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Bonnie Goldstein just posted a great "Hot Document"—the police report filed by the mom in Port St. Lucie, Fla., whose 5-year-old son was "voted out" of his kindergarten class by his teacher and classmates because he was disruptive. I was grateful to read the police report because my reaction to the initial story was, "There's GOT to be more to this." Alas, the only thing the complaint clarified for me was that the teacher meant for the little boy to be dismissed from the class for the day, not forever. But how is a 5-year-old, especially an autistic 5-year-old, supposed to figure that out?
It does seem that the little boy was a distraction to his classmates, and the fact he was "in the process of being diagnosed with autism," as the article says, would explain that. I would hope that, had the voting-off incident not happened, the school and his parents would have worked hard to find the right classroom situation for him, whether special needs or some combination of special needs and time in a "typical" classroom. No child deserves to be humiliated like that. Kindergarten is not a reality show. But more importantly, kindergarten is not a democracy. Sure, let the 5-year-olds vote on what story they read or whether to have cookies or crackers for a snack. But if a child is causing a problem in class, the teacher needs to be a grown-up and deal with it.
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Ellen, that is one gutsy post, and a public service, too. (Maybe Prudie has some suggestions on ways to get the "Clooney it up a little bit'' message out?) No way the big-screen Sex and the City could match last night's Daily Show spoof, in which Jason Jones, John Oliver, Larry Wilmore, and Aasif Mandvi stir their cosmos with cigars and drink a toast to herpes. And anyone on the lookout for something quieter and sturdier—an anti-SATC, set on the Upper West Side—might like to check out the DVD I saw last weekend, Starting Out in the Evening, a movie so carefully made it feels hand-stitched. Frank Langella completely inhabits the role of Leonard Schiller, an aging novelist with writer's block who feels time is running out. When this know-it-all grad student, Lauren Ambrose, barges into his life, full of plans to make her name by resuscitating his career, you keep thinking you know what's coming—will it be this or will it be that? But then you don't, and it isn't, in a way that restores faith in the kind of writing the lead character demands of himself. (And every writerly kid who says he or she just loves to sit down at the keyboard should see this, too; what a brutal life filling blank pages with fiction is.) The closest it gets to cliché is that it's Lili Taylor (beautifully) playing Leonard's Lili Taylor-like daughter; she fears her most (re)productive years are slipping away as well, while her boyfriend, Adrian Lester, who in my one quibble seems not to have heard of the blogosphere, pours all his energy into starting an online magazine, so his friends will have a place to kick around ideas. Not that we all have the same taste in movies any more than we do in candidates, but I hadn't heard much about this one, and don't know when I've been so floored by a film.
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Somebody please stop me, but I'm afraid I have more to say on the subject that Tim Noah challenged us to: "What makes married women want to have affairs?"
I ran into Meghan in the ladies' room, and we both scoffed at the notion that "You don't hear stories about men telling their wives they no longer want to have sex."
I will agree with you on one point. Yeah, you don't hear stories about men telling their wives they no longer want to have sex. (In the same way they don't call and don't tell you they want to break up—they just disappear—or so the stereotype goes.) You do, or at least I do, hear stories from women about how their husbands have stopped having sex with them. For years.
Here's just one example that I found quickly. OK, the guy is depressed; maybe he is atypical. But, as a woman with female friends and relatives, I hear many stories like this.
I don't think the apt question is why do women want to cheat? I think the question is, why don't women cheat more?
And at the risk of embarrassing myself yet again, I will venture an answer with no research to back it up whatsoever except for my own little opinions and anecdotes.
First, a caveat. I sort of hate to talk about this stuff in this way. I hate to get into the gross generalizations of "all men always do this" and "all women always do that." So could we just stipulate that when I say "men" I mean "some men, sometimes" and ditto for "women"?
A male acquaintance once said to me, "I want to have sex with every woman I see." This sentence troubled me for a long time. Did he really want to have sex with every woman he saw?
I decided that the problematic word wasn't every. It was see. I assumed he simply didn't see women he didn't find attractive. That was upsetting in its own way, but at least that meant he didn't want to have sex with every woman in his purview.
I told him I'd heard that men think about sex something like 10 times a day. He told me that figure was way too low. It was more like 50 or 100 times a day ("or 1,000 or 1,000,000," other men chimed in—if this is true, how do men get anything done?). We hear statistics like that a lot; turns out they are all bunk. Nonetheless, it got me wondering: How many times a day did I think about sex? How many men did I see that I wanted to have sex with?
I decided to do some observation and experimentation. Turns out the amount of time I think about sex is quite variable. Sometimes it can be a lot in one day. Sometimes it can be not for days or even weeks.
As for the experiment, I played a little game with myself: I decided that when I was on the subway I would ask myself, "If I had to have sex with someone in this car, who would it be?"
Granted, I don't often ride the subway at the height of rush hour when there are a lot more people to choose from, and that fluorescent lighting is pretty harsh, but I have to tell you, some days it was pretty hard to find anyone at all (of course choosing someone solely based on appearance is not the only way to become interested in someone). The conclusion: It's pretty rare that I see a man I want to have sex with. (In real life, anyway, on movie and television screens is a different story.) So rare, in fact, that when I do find myself attracted to someone it is a very powerful feeling.
Now, I am happily married, so perhaps that partially explains this rarity. (Though when I think back to before I was married, I think I was always a one-crush-at-a-time kind of girl. Or, wait, maybe two. Or three. Or four. Well, maybe five at the most. But there was always a reason, albeit shallow, that I liked someone—I thought he was cute or I liked his voice or something he had said or his personality, or the way he played guitar turned me on. It wasn't solely because he had the right equipment between his legs.)
Perhaps women are just more picky. While men are looking for quantity, maybe women are looking for quality.
On the other hand, guys, maybe you need to do something about the way you look. Clooney it up a little bit, for god's sake. Do some push-ups every day at the very least.
(True, I am no Angelina Jolie, but I am not actually on the prowl, either.)
And, now, an even touchier subject. Why do some women stop having sex with their husbands?
This may sting a little. I have no delicate way to put it. Once again, it's a question of quality.
Bad sex. Obviously, sexless marriage is a deeper issue that involves more relationship conflicts than just the physical. But, speaking as a woman, all I can tell you is that if she knew she was going to have a good time, she would want to do it. Often.
As for men, I think it was Jerry Seinfeld who said, "Sex is like pizza. Even when it's bad, it's pretty good."
Not so for women.
Best-case scenario, bad sex is like being stuck in a traffic jam when you have a million other things you'd rather be doing, places you'd rather be.
Worst-case scenario, well, ask the Austrian woman whose father locked her in a basement for 24 years, raping and impregnating her repeatedly.
Now, it's not all you. It takes two to tango, and both parties need to "bring it" (or, in the case of the incestuous Austrian rapist, "leave it"), but all I can say is, guys, it wouldn't hurt for you to work on your skills.
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Tim: Last week you challenged us to reveal the reasons women cheat (or want to) in response to our posts about this Philip Weiss article. I'm late to the party. But first I wanted to second Ellen's no-nonsense answer: For the same reasons men do. Desire, selfishness, the thrill of novelty, love, boredom, a boost to the ego—the list goes on.
Second, though: You second Weiss in suggesting that the female sex drive is, in the aggregate, less "pronounced," as you put it. And you write that you hear stories about women who don't want to have sex with their partners, but "[y]ou don't hear stories about men telling their wives they no longer want to have sex." But in fact, you do-at least, you do if you're a woman. I've heard this very complaint from female friends whose husbands/partners are too busy or stressed or distracted for sex. And according to some reports, like this one in Psychology Today, low male libido is reportedly on the rise, affecting some 20 percent to 25 percent of men. Meanwhile, several couples therapists—most notably Michele Weiner-Davis, author of The Sex-Starved Marriage—have suggested that male sexual apathy can powerfully affect marriages and long-term relationships. On a Yahoo Answers thread about low male libido, you'll see a post from a woman bemoaning that her male partner would rather "snuggle" and "bond" than have sex.
Now, low male libido probably has cultural and environmental causes. (Anti-depressants, estrogens, etc.) And so yeah, there may be real underlying differences in male and female sex drives in the aggregate, as you argue. But I think most women who've spent much time talking openly to other women would say that the desire for sexual novelty within a long-term relationship hardly seems to be the exclusive province of the Y chromosome. On second thought, though, maybe it's better for everyone if men still think it is.
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About Clinton I have nothing to say. But I do want to give a shout out to my girl, Marjorie and say this: I've got your back! Anyone brave enough to write about the fallout from the gender wars for Newsweek, that magazine of Middle America, is going to need it. I mean, even conservative poster girl Condi Rice gets the smack-down when she dares to discuss the reality of race in America. (Thanks to The Root's Jimi Izrael for pointing me to this gem!) But don't worry, Marjorie. I'm pretty sure I can take Lou Dobbs if he comes sniffing for trouble. He looks a little soft around both the middle and the head.
On a different and more interesting note, I've been wondering around the meaning of this report by a nonprofit adoption-advocacy group that concluded that a decade of de-emphasizing race in adoptions might not have been such a win-win idea. The report examines the impact of the Multiethnic Placement Act of 1994, and finds that although there has been a small increase (17 percent to 20 percent) in transracial adoptions since the law went into effect, many of these children end up struggling with being "different" and face major challenges in their quest to develop strong identities. Meanwhile their well-intentioned parents have not been prepared by social workers for the racial and cultural challenges they are likely to face because the social workers fear violating the law.
Having covered the foster care system for the New York Times, I can tell you this much: It sucks. No child should be left to linger there one minute longer than absolutely necessary. Yet even with the law, African-American children are still disproportionally represented in foster care and remain there longer than children of other ethnicities. It seems to make only common sense not to discourage any qualified and loving family who wants to adopt a child from doing so. The problem is that, once again, we can't seem to find a middle ground on these issues. Either we insist on only matching like to like, and children suffer. Or we shove these families together, then close our eyes and stick our fingers in our ears and shout, "Love is colorblind! Love is colorblind! Love is colorblind!" until whoever is saying something we don't want to hear gives up and goes away.
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Not to beat a not-quite-yet dead horse but I agree with Emily and Melinda about Hillary Clinton's assassination comments. Clinton knew exactly what she was saying. That's why she repeated the comments after having already made the same point to Time magazine in March. How can she say her comments were prompted in part by Kennedy's cancer diagnosis when she had already said the same thing a few months ago when there was no talk of Kennedy having cancer? Perhaps the fact that her original comments did not get wide notice explains why she wanted to re-telegraph those sentiments to a wider audience. She seems too smart and calculating to be making so many subtle and not-so-subtle racially tinged remarks by mistake. Does anyone believe that it's not more effective to send these signals out and then say, "Oops. So sorry. Never mind," than it is to not say them at all? Once she has sown doubts, raised fears, and planted ideas in the minds of people who have racial fears and animosities, she has effectively turned those people against her opponent. In Obama's case, the threat of assassination has real resonance in the black community.
On another front, the racial overtones of some of Clinton's comments overall are further eroding relations between black women who support Obama and white women who support her. The extent to which these two groups will now see themselves as having shared political agendas is highly in doubt. Judging by the strong reactions of diehard Clinton and Obama supporters to a piece I wrote on this subject in Newsweek this week, it will be a very long time before we see strong black/white feminist coalitions being formed. My feeling is that by criticizing black women's support for a black male candidate over a white female candidate, white Clinton supporters are ignoring the duality of black women's identity and alienating them by expecting them to choose between their gender and their race. This is a luxury that black women just don't have.
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It's interesting that Ruth and Rachael both used the word evil—as in, what Hillary said about RFK's assassination was unfortunate but not evil. Now, I wouldn't use that particular word to describe Clinton or what she said about Bobby Kennedy, either. In fact, I'm not sure I've ever described anyone on this side of—let's give Adolf the day off—Idi Amin that way, at least in part because it brings to mind Margo Channing's wonderful mocking of "Eve Evil, little Eve Evil,'' in All About Eve, and you shouldn't say that word and grin. But another way in which we in the media have not learned all we might have from the fiasco of 2000 is in our peculiarly American determination to see strategery everywhere but no evil, ever.
Which is why we bat down any impugning of motives with that sobering word: To question intent at all is to ascribe evil, and only nuts go that far. Paul Krugman did this just yesterday when he explained that Clinton's invocation of RFK's assassination is actually Obama's problem: "One more trumped-up scandal won't persuade the millions of voters who stuck with Mrs. Clinton despite incessant attacks on her character that she really was evil all along.'' So, there is nothing in between A-OK and ... that word he said? What an odd paradox in which we assume we are always being played—but never with really bad intentions. Especially since it was fear of appearing to be too hard on Junior that got us this president in the first place. And, as even his former press secretary Scott McClellan says outright in his new memoir, that's also how we marched off to his purposeless war. The assumption was that Bush (and even more to the point, Colin Powell) would never have told us the war was necessary if that weren't the case -- because who would do that? No one we'd put in charge. Just as Hillary would never have stirred the pot on purpose—because that would be evil and she isn't evil, thus she couldn't have done it. For a bunch of skeptics, we really have a weirdly high opinion of human nature.
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Great answers in "The Fray" to Timothy Noah's question about why women cheat:
Desire takes many forms.
Laura Kipnis’ Against Love answered Tim’s question!
It’s about body image.
My “open marriage” was really a lousy marriage in disguise.
Why I cheat.
Why women cheat with women.
I’m a man, and I don’t fantasize about having an affair.
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Faulkner was right, and that's what makes HBO's Recount so hard to sit through: It isn't that we know how it's going to end. It's that it hasn't ended, and isn't past, for our asthmatic planet or our military families or our still wholly unreformed electoral process.
On the electoral front, Dahlia, your point about sagging voter confidence being self-fulfilling is dead right. But do we boost that confidence by telling African-American Ohioans who waited for hours in the rain to vote in 2004—because Franklin County redistributed voting machines from inner-city polling places where they were in short supply to rural areas where there were too many—that their concerns are "idiotic'' or that voter suppression is all in their heads? Every study of electronic voting machines suggests they're hackable, prone to glitches and easy to upgrade—for a price. (And if ATMs were half as unreliable, wouldn't we have solved the problem before you could say, "Katherine Harris actually wore that?'') The real question is how much voter confidence is worth to us, since solutions on the cheap haven't worked that well.
After the train wreck of the 2000 recount, Florida's Sarasota County purchased electronic voting machines from Election Systems & Software, the same company that produced the ballots of hanging-chad fame. (This despite the fact that, as this barely seen but excellent Dan Rather documentary argues, ES&S was having a hard time marketing its touch-screen voting machines until it decided to cut back on the quality of paper used to make the ballots that wound up dimpled and hanging in 2000. The company's own quality-control folks refused to sign off on the change and warned their bosses that if they went with the cheaper paper, it would expand in the Florida humidity and be a big old mess by Election Day. They were ignored, but they were right. And when their predictions came true, their company was rewarded with contracts for the shiny new electronic voting machines they'd been having trouble unloading. Whee!)
OK, so now it's 2006, and those same ES& Smachines work their magic in Sarasota County, where thousands of people sign affidavits that they had trouble casting ballots in just one race, for Democratic Congressional candidate Christine Jennings, who according to the machine tally lost by fewer than 400 votes. Golly, can't let that happen again, so the super magnanimous Charlie Crist, the state's new Republican governor, says let's do away with those touch-screen machines that leave no paper trail. Only, tucked into the wildly popular bill that did away with paperless ballots was ... the provision that moved up the date of the state's presidential primary and led to the current fight over what to do about Florida's delegates to this summer's Democratic National Convention. Republicans in the state "knew exactly what they were doing,'' says Christine Jennings, who is still running against Vern Buchanan. Only, he's an incumbent now. That the solutions just keep making things worse makes you wonder how seriously we take the problem. And as long as we put the need for voting reform on a par with taking on little green men, 2000 won't ever be over.
P.S. to Ruth: A blog virgin, who knew? I agree she didn't mean TO say it. But that's not the same as not meaning what she said.
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Our colleague Ruth Marcus weighs in on the RFK controversy:
Ok, I’m feeling the need to weigh in on assasin-gate and disagree with my friends Emily, Rosa and Melinda about how bad Hillary Clinton’s comments were. This is my first blog post, ever, so I hope there are extra points for a trifecta of disagreement.
Emily is right, of course, about Clinton’s bad grasp of history. Her husband had effectively sewn up the nomination in March actually, even earlier than Emily argues. Not only was the New Hampshire primary held on March 12 in 1968—not this year’s Jan. 8, which would make April the new June, but Bobby Kennedy only announced his candidacy after New Hampshire. I agree with Emily, too, about both the ugly prevalence of “gotcha” politics and the “string of offensive statements” that have come from Sen. Clinton of late.
Also, summoning the memory of RFK’s assassination in the context of her campaign was a pretty stupid thing to say—especially given her opponent, and especially given the unfortunate timing.
But it’s the fundamental stupidity of Clinton’s comment—when was the last time anyone named Clinton apologized so fast?—convinces me that she did not have a sinister motive or message, and that her emphasis was on when (June) not the what (assassination.) What could she have had to gain politically by the ensuing firestorm? The fact that she said it before—and no one much noticed—isn’t evidence to me of her evil intent (it does give the lie to the Kennedys-on-the-brain argument) as much as it is that she didn’t really understand to what extent this was an unfortunate thing to say.
To me, what this shows is that if you mix up enough exhaustion with enough self-pity (“They’re trying to elbow me out”), and there are plenty of both in the Clinton campaign these days, you end up with dumb comments like this. And I thought John Harris made a strong argument in Politico, that this one was hyped beyond all reason.
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So this is what it's come to: the Lone Gunman strategy. It's no secret that Hillary Clinton has been hoping for a colossal misstep by Barack Obama, or a damaging revelation, to end his candidacy, leaving her the last woman standing. But the satisfying irony would be that Clinton has made the ultimate in political blunders by voicing the possibility of the assassination of her opponent. It's chilling, the cool, uninflected way she casually brings up what she calls the "historic fact" that Bobby Kennedy was murdered in June—before the end of the primary season, so thank goodness Hubert Humphrey hadn't withdrawn prematurely! Later, when forced to apologize, she explained that long primary seasons often run into June, as her own husband's did, and anyway the Kennedys have been on her mind because of the brain tumor diagnosis of Ted Kennedy (take note: Voodoo dolls really do work). This is garbage both as history and self-explanation. In 1968 the presidential primaries started in March; and in his first presidential race, Bill Clinton had effectively won the nomination in April. As for the Kennedy-on-the-mind excuse, Hillary made the same assassination argument to Time magazine in March, before Sen. Kennedy's diagnosis (isn't it funny that this wasn't picked up then).
I don't like the game of gotcha, in which every ill-phrased remark is grounds for ending a candidacy. But recently Clinton has been making a string of offensive statements, from saying "hardworking white Americans" support her and not Obama, to comparing her effort to seat delegates from Florida and Michigan to the civil-rights marchers beaten in Selma, Ala. But calling forth the forces of madness to give her the presidency—please, let her end the madness of her campaign.
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XXer Rosa Brooks sends this one in:
I think we know exactly what Hillary meant:
"Nice nominee you got there ... sure would be a shame if anything happened to him."
Awfully big-hearted of her to be willing to stick around through August, just in case ...
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I'm not saying she literally hopes he dies soon. (Plus, she's apologized, so case closed, right?) But Hillary didn't mean what she said this time just like she wasn't exactly shouting out to hardworking white people, and Bill didn't quite say Jesse equals Barack, and her surrogates never meant to push the whole image of him as a druggie in the 'hood, and she never meant to reanimate the whole highly racial Jeremiah Wright hoo-ha by saying—gosh darn the timing, just as things were dying down—that he woulda never been her pick for pastor. But either Hillary Clinton is one smart, savvy, and occasionally even on-message politician—in which case she is well aware of what it means to reference the possible assassination of a black leader in this country—or she isn't and doesn't. It can't be both.
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I admit I watched Sex and the City, the series, pretty religiously. I missed the beginning. And after watching my first episode, I hated it. I hated the way they talked: the faux fabulousness. But it was oddly addictive. It was like a train wreck I couldn't stop staring at.
And then I started to genuinely like it. While still hating it. Sort of.
But the end, the end, it drove me mad.
I was never a fan of Mr. Big. I thought he was miscast. I thought he was downright abusive to Carrie. I have dated men like this. They want to spend time with you, on their terms, only in private, and will never acknowledge their relationship with you in public. For years, they might introduce you as their "friend." They come and go as they please. Then suddenly they marry someone else. Yet they still call you. They string you along with scant moments of tenderness.
Anyway, it seemed a relationship for a 20-year-old, not a wise, powerful thirtysomething woman.
And this was my main gripe with the show. It promised to be about wise, powerful, independent women. Women who can fuck around like men, but at the end of the week, they always show up for brunch with their girlfiriends. But in the end, it was just about four single women who wanted to find Prince Charming.
Jane Austen with fornication!
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Melinda,
I admit this is a new one for me, defending Hillary, but I don't think that's quite what she meant. My take on it (and some of our Slate colleagues seem to concur) is that she was referring to the fact that it's only May, so it's too soon for her to think about dropping out (which ignores the reality that she can't possibly get enough delegates to pass Obama).
It's unfortunate and a little odd that she chose to cite RFK's assassination as an example of primaries that last past May, especially given all the uncomfortable attention given to the idea that Obama, as an African-American, is at risk for being assassinated himself.
It's interesting, though, that you raise the idea of Hillary becoming vice president, as there's a lot of discussion about that today in the blogosphere, and her chief fundraiser is making veiled threats about the consequences of not putting her on the ticket.
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Sorry to get distracted from sex and HBO for a minute, but just when I thought Hillary Clinton could no longer surprise me, did she really just say hey, he could always get shot? Which raises the question: In the unlikely event of a "dream ticket,'' who do we see for White House taster?
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Oh gosh. Can I hide in a closet for the next two weeks, until, like a bad skin peel, this movie flakes off and goes away? For the first five or six or 20 seasons that it was on, I avoided the show, out of principal. What principal, I'm not sure—just the commercials about it on HBO made me twitchy with disdain. Then I realized that it was hardly fair to judge a show without ever having actually watched it. So I did, catching maybe six or eight episodes in a row. It was, I admit, oddly addictive. Still, I stopped when I realized I was missing half the scenes because my eyes were rolling so hard in my head. Also, I got a headache. I disliked much about the show, including the blatant, smug narcissism of all the characters. (The last show I watched was the one in which none of them even knew where they were supposed to vote, because they never bothered. After that, I was done.) I realize that was the point, in part; I just didn't like it. But my major problem was the total and complete absence of black, Latino, Asian, Middle Eastern, etc. etc. etc., people in that fairy-tale New York. Not just in starring roles— because, let's face it, most people in America, even in urban areas, lead fairly segregated lives—but even in background scenes! Except, of course, for Blair Underwood, Hollywood's designated black man. It was as if a plague had descended on the NYC that I know and love, wiping out only the dark-skinned and unfabulous. Someone must have painted the blood of a lamb over Underwood's door so that he alone was spared.
I preferred Girlfriends. Equally ridiculous in many ways, but five times funnier.
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I was going to say I watched that show sort of like I used to watch Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom as a kid. But that's wrong, because on the other side of the earth, there really are wildebeests leaving the herd. Whereas nowhere in nature are there women who talk (and walk around NYC in 4-inch heels) like Carrie and her crew, who, except for Miranda, I could never see her being friends with. It seemed like sexed-up Disney to me, still all about the prince and the shoes. Mr. Big was appealing, though, I thought. And when I saw his portrayer once, flirting with a plus-size cashier in an airport, that made me like him even more.
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As every mom and single woman in my corner of the universe knows, Sex and the City opens as a movie next weekend. So, with the critical distance born of many years of reruns, are you lovers or haters? Me, I only really discovered the show last summer, after I had a car accident and my sister sent me a season to keep me company while I recuperated in the hospital. (Yes, once I am out of date, I like to be a good decade out of date.) Against my instincts, I was hooked. I loved the relationships between the women, and that counted for more than my annoyance with flibberty gibbet Mr. Big. I thought the writing got sharper and wittier as the show progressed. And I felt like certain episodes (like the one in which Carrie loses her shoes at a baby shower and the mom host is ogre-ish about it) made me sit up and think about how annoying all the kid and baby obsession I've come to take for granted is to women my age and younger who aren't mothers. Plenty of flaws, too, I realize—jump in?
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Tim and Ellen, the few married women I know who've come right out and said they were having affairs all wound up divorcing the hubby and marrying the "other man.'' Only, those are just the ones who talked about it. One of my most gorgeous married friends once complained she wouldn't even know how to get something new started, so that one in three still seems high to me. But then, I am someone who missed her own fling: One night maybe 10 years ago, I get home from work and my husband says nonchalantly, oh, nearly forgot, there's a message for you I saved. (Which should have been a red flag right there, because how many times in our marriage has he said that?) OK, who was it? Dunno, cough, cough, didn't listen. Turns out, the message is from some guy I never heard of saying hey Melinda, LOVED our super-great time together in Chicago and just found out I'm going to be in D.C. on such-and-such a date and sure would like to see you again, pant, pant; call me! So not only did somebody pretending to be me have a big old night out—but she was enough of a woman with a plan to use my name from the get-go, and hand out my unlisted home number, too. I half suspected a certain bony, bitter (see, it is never a nice word) officemate—who I'd bet my life believes Hillary wuz robbed. But I still don't know how (whether?) this love story began or ended—or maybe it's still going on.
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Catherine Price's Broadsheet post about a recent article on honor killings has been haunting me all week, not because the subject is new but because, like her, I can't get past the idea of a father stomping, stabbing and suffocating his 17 year-old daughter to death, with the help of his sons, and of her uncles then spitting on her grave in disgust. Why? Because the girl had a crush on and spoke to a British soldier in Basra.
I know many of us have heard these horrific stories before. Still, i never cease to be amazed, and repulsed, at the level of violence toward women and girls that is tolerated in countries across Africa and the Arab world, in East Asia and Eastern Europe, in China and throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.
Yes, we have plenty of violence against women at home, but I think it's safe to say that the level of violence against women and girls here, doesn't even compare to what takes place overseas. In many cases it is not only tolerated, or ignored, it is officially sanctioned by governments that claim they can do nothing to stop violent practices that occur mostly in tradition-bound enclaves ruled by male elders, or taking place in war-torn countries in states of perpetual anarchy.
Gang rapes, revenge rape, war rapes, punishment rapes, beatings, honor killings, genital mutilation, forced prostitution, the sale and marriage of little girls to grizzled old perverts. It's enough to turn the stomach. As American women we can march and speak out, we can give money to organizations working hard to prevent and hopefully end these ugly practices, and it will still continue unless the international community comes together to address it head on. We need formal, international treaties that attach sanctions and penalties against countries that tolerate this form of gender terrorism.
Too bad the United Nations can't take the lead. Its credibility on this issue is very comprised given that hundreds of U.N. peacekeepers working in troubled countries have been implicated in shameful sexual abuse scandals involving coerced sex with girls as young as eight in exchange for food and empty promises of jobs, or payments of a single dollar. Some of the U.N. workers are from the very countries where violence against women is an ingrained part of the culture. How sad that they are importing the worst of their values rather than their best, spreading disease and despair instead of the goodwill the UN is supposed to foster.
I know these traditions date back to past generations and are culturally institutionalized. I know too that the perpetrators are not usually enlightened or educated men, but barbaric and backward—yes backward—men. Still, this doesn't mean the larger society has to accept it. Nor do official government leaders who are usually educated men who know better.
How ironic that the term "honor killing" even exists. There is certainly no honor when men attack the most defenseless, least respected, less protected members of their society. And there's definitely no honor when world leaders, like the U.S., that are not shy about imposing their values on other countries in other ways, do so little about it.
The first sign of societal breakdown is when the male members of a society turn on their women and children. Seems to me that the affected countries were broken long ago.
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All right, Tim Noah, I will bite.
"What makes married women want to have affairs?" you ask?
The same things that make married men want to have affairs (excepting, of course, the desire to "spread seed").
Monogamy is hard. For all of us. It's unrealistic for people who live as long as humans do today. We, too, crave variety. We, too, have fantasies. We, too, are busy, overworked, have too many responsibilities, and want to blow off some steam. Some of us are neglected, abused, oppressed, unloved, ignored, deprived of affection, unhappy, unfulfilled. Some of us are just bored. Some of us are just horny. Some of us are getting old and we want to feel young and sexy again.
Some of us have been brainwashed by the Jane Austen fantasy, and we are still looking for Mr. Darcy.
Some of us love our husbands, but, well, we are married, not dead. There are a lot of hot, tempting women in the world, but there are a lot of hot, tempting men, as well, and we are exposed to their hot, tempting images everywhere, every day, all the time. (Note to Jonathan Rhys Meyers: Call me!)
I suspect there are as many reasons women want to have affairs as there are women having affairs.
I find it curious that so many people still buy into the myth that pairing off and staying together forever is the only model of a successful relationship. It's hard not to acquiesce to this religion-enforced, society-sanctioned, government-rewarded "lifestyle."
But as our rates of infidelity and divorce suggest, it's not realistic. This is not to say that we should live in a sexual free-for-all. There are great rewards that come with being in an emotionally, as well as sexually, intimate relationship. We do seem to naturally pair off, for a while, and have relationships this way—but serially. I think serial monogamy is perhaps more realistic, though it is also more complicated.
The problem is, how long is "for a while"? How long should it be? Seven minutes or 70 years?
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A guest post (or rather a challenge) from Slate's Tim Noah:
May I put in a good word for Philip Weiss?
Before proceeding, let me stipulate that I know Phil and have edited him in the past. It would be a stretch to call him a friend (we've exchanged perhaps five sentences over the past 20 years), but we hung out a bit during the 1980s and I remain fond of him.
One thing I've always admired about Phil is his personal courage as a writer of nonfiction, even at the risk of appearing foolish. Certainly he displays courage in his New York magazine piece, "What Makes Married Men Want To Have Affairs?" The article is an attempt to take something we already know—duh, males crave sexual variety—and explore what can be done about it without adopting the familiar posture of the locker-room raconteur, on the one hand, or the prim scold, on the other. To achieve this, it is necessary to engage men and women in a conversation with one another. Phil hints strongly that he himself has strayed, or (less likely, I think) that he has come so close to straying that it "jolted my marriage." Phil has discussed this "over the years with about six or seven people, and when you leave out my wife and therapist, they're all men." Which obviously didn't get him very far. Here, he's proposing something new. A topic seldom discussed in mixed company—indeed, the very topic that probably occasioned the invention of that idiotic phrase "mixed company" in the first place—is to be discussed with both men and women present.
The trouble with Phil's piece, as various XXers have pointed out, is that the female libido is scarcely heard from. Phil portrays women mostly as enforcers of monogamy and domesticity, and men as caged libertines who daydream about boffing the nearest Hooters' waitress and on occasion actually do. Phil acknowledges that married women have affairs, too—15 percent to men's 25 percent. But while the promiscuous men Phil writes about come off as mainstream humanists—regular guys—the promiscuous women Phil writes about are all exotic creatures—sex researchers, sex counselors, free-love bohemians, and prostitutes. The only "normal" woman willing to consider promiscuity, even for a moment, is his wife. She shuts down Phil's campaign to establish whoopee utopia by pointing out that if he wanted to be unfaithful, he'd have to accomodate her infidelity, too. Of course he backs down immediately—and realizes life and love are more complicated than his desire is willing to acknowledge.
The default female response to Phil's piece is to clobber him for being such a, you know, guy. Instead, I'd like to see a woman take up Phil's invitation to converse about the uneasy truce between monogamy and sexual desire. What makes married women want to have affairs?
I'll readily grant that taking up this topic requires considerably more daring from a woman than it took from Phil, because our society is a lot less tolerant of female infidelity, or even female daydreams about infidelity. In that stupid Stanley Kubrick movie, Eyes Wide Shut, hubby Tom Cruise plunges into a rococo sexual odyssey because wifey Nicole Kidman says merely that she experienced unrequited lust for another man. In older movies, whenever a woman sins, or contemplates sin, blam!—she's immediately run over by a truck. The political world is even more retrograde. There's a reason why you'll never hear presidential candidate Hillary Clinton say, as Jimmy Carter said in 1976, that she's experienced lust in her heart. If she ever let us find out she'd acted on it, as Bill did, her political career would never survive, as Bill's did. So, yes: This is hard stuff for a woman to talk about it. But talking about it seems more constructive, not to mention more interesting, than finger-wagging.
So how about it, XXers? You probably didn't need Phil Weiss to tell you why men have affairs, or at least fantasize about having affairs: They crave sexual variety, they long to recapture lost youth, blah blah blah. Like everything else about male sexuality, the male desire to lie with another woman is boringly uncomplicated. But why do women have affairs? The judgment of literature (Anna Karenina, Madam Bovary) is that they feel trapped and oppressed, or, less sympathetically, that they're easily gulled by preying males one or two notches up the social ladder. Two centuries later, I would imagine that life is a bit different. The answer we heard from writers like Erica Jong and Gael Greene back in the swingin' Plato's Retreat 1970s was that women crave sexual variety in precisely the same way men do. Three decades later, though, feminism no longer insists that women's desires and inclinations be identical to those of men. It may even be permitted to recognize that, at least superficially, the female sex drive seems, in the aggregate, less pronounced (or at least less conspicuous) than the male sex drive. You don't hear stories about men telling their wives they no longer want to have sex. You do hear stories about women telling their husbands they no longer want to have sex.
So, what's it all about?
Please don't refer me to The Erotic Silence of the American Wife and the groaning bookshelf of similar titles out there. My bad, I haven't read them. But let's face it: Those books were written for and by women, not for men and women. They're the equivalent of a ladies' lunch. Let's have a mixer instead. Why do women want to cheat?
Two ground rules:
1.) No diversions into what's cultural and what's "hard-wired" about women's sexuality. Once you fall down that rabbit hole, there's no coming back. Just talk about what is, and skip the warring evolutionary and behaviorist theories as to why this should be so.
2.) No bad-mouthing your husbands, or the male sex in general. Phil managed to write without bad-mouthing his wife, or women in general (except perhaps by implication). Even if men really are unregenerate shitheads, dwelling on this will just turn this back into a discussion about men.
Anyone game?
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Agree entirely, D, that Clinton doesn't get to reduce her loss to sexism. But what's the evidence that she has? She made that one "demeaning to millions of women" comment this week. Bill Clinton apparently mentioned it. (Not sure that counts, since I remain convinced that he is half-engaged in sabotage.) There was the "iron my shirts" moment (a real instance). There was the pile-on comment after the Philadelphia debate. Maybe there are several more instances, and I'm just forgetting. Or is it more that we all notice and remark upon it when she plays the gender card than that she plays it often? This is a woman who has spoken several times a day, for 15 or so minutes, over 15 months. She has said a lot of things a lot more frequently than "poor me I'm a victim." Hasn't she?
The Linda Hirshman thing also seems to me overblown and overstated. Not that it's entirely or even mostly wrong, just that to argue that all powerful women are portrayed as harpies all the time is no more true and useful than any other universal catchall. I buy that it's often hard to be a powerful woman—and harder than it is to be a powerful man, because there are fewer safe and familiar moves to make. OK. But I think Clinton has pulled it off more than most, and more than she has screwed it up. She is not Blanche DuBois! [insert here second and third Tennessee William examples that I am too illiterate to think of.] That's part of why so many women keep voting for her. I think.
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The ailing Ted Kennedy has said that he would like the successor to his seat be his wife, Vicki. Isn’t this rather richly ironic since Kennedy has done all he can to stop the Clintons from extending their White House dynasty by opposing Hillary’s election to the presidency? Ted’s Senate seat has been in his family for more than 50 years. (It was previously JFK’s.) I’m from Massachusetts, so I know that voters there are reluctant to accept that they have free will when it comes to the political ambitions of Kennedys, but it’s unseemly and un-American for this clan to think it has a permanent claim on any office. XX’s own Rosa Brooks pointed out that the late Benazir Bhutto, seen in this country as a champion of democracy, named her son as her successor in her will. Brooks wrote, “To Bhutto, political power was something one could inherit, something to be passed along from spouse to spouse and from parent to child. … That's dynastic politics, not democratic politics.” Dynastic politics hasn’t worked out very well for us lately. If a candidate is a member of a political family and is also by all measures worthy of being elected to office, fine. But let’s stop choosing our elected officials because they’re married to, or children of, officeholders.
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Anyone else catch yesterday’s ripped-from-the-headlines Law & Order finale? About a New York governor who hires expensive young hookers (and some strange, tangentially related murder)? Anyone else notice that the single biggest difference between the Spitzer narrative and L&O’s—aside from the fact that the fictional governor gets away with it—was the craven legal meddling by the ruthlessly ambitious Silda character? Just checkin’.
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Emily I don’t think anyone disputes that hideous instances of sexism have been stirred up in this campaign. Nor does anyone dispute that Ms. Clinton is entitled to address it, which she has done very deftly at times. The question is whether she’s entitled to reduce her entire failed campaign to sexism—which has the practical effect of splitting women into those-who-are-angry-about-sexism, and those who what? Think it’s acceptable? There’s one other practical effect that warrants mentioning, and that is that it reduces a complex, brilliant, and talented candidate to a big whomping cliché. My friend Susannah writes: “I find it increasingly unbearable to watch Hillary. It feels like she has become the archetype I find most painful to see in women—a high-maintenance, delusional, and "difficult" woman who feels entitled to do whatever she likes. ... Meanwhile, Obama is forced to tiptoe around essentially just humoring her. There is a pathetic "Yes, dear" quality to the way he is forced to react to her these days.”
This mirrors a sense I’ve had that we might have finally crossed the Hirshman line. Linda Hirshman argued persuasively that all powerful, ambitious women are at some point dismissed as “hysterical” or “insane.” Too true. The problem now is that when Clinton behaves irrationally, we can’t call her out for it because it would be sexist. If we can't call irrational behavior irrational because the character in question is a woman, then it’s a short hop from here to a Tennessee Williams play ...
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I dutifully watch American Idol every week because my daughter is a huge fan. After two seasons, I have learned to (almost) enjoy it. I basically just pretend I'm living in a different age and a pleasant second-string country, maybe in Latin America or the Middle East, where every week me and my extended family sit down to watch a goofy variety show filled with amateur singing and colorful local characters. Then last night, after the final results show, I found myself unreasonably elated when they announced that David Cook had won. For those of you who are above such frippery, you might not know that this was not at all the expected result. The night before, after the final showdown, the judges had all but declared the other finalist, David Archuleta, to be the better man. Then last night they dragged us through Fox infomercials and a string of has-been celebrities until, an hour into the show, they announced that in fact COOK had won, by nearly 12 million votes.
So why do I care? And why should you? Well, here is my very unfounded theory: Cook is the Democrats, and Archuleta is the Republicans. More specifically, Cook is Barack Obama and Archuleta is, if not John McCain then some dependably modern Republican-type. Both come off as sweet, good guys, but Cook is older and decidedly cooler. He's a baby-faced rocker from just outside Kansas City whose performances have been unreliable. One week he's awesome and the next so-so. He's mostly cheerful but sometimes moody and glum and seems to expect to lose.
Archuleta, meanwhile, is a 17-year-old fuddy-duddy from Utah who grew up singing show tunes and Elton John. His mother is from Honduras, and he has four siblings. He's deeply humble and entitled at the same time. I've always imagined him as home-schooled but I have no evidence, outside his large family and unyouthful musical tastes. A Los Angeles Times blog suspected he skipped the first verse of "Imagine" on Idol because he's a Mormon and would take offense at the line about "no religion." I think of him more as a Mitt Romney-type—weekly transmitting secret religious messages only his fellow conservative Christians would pick up. Every week I scrutinized his song choices and his outfit, and quizzed no one in particular: Why did he choose Neil Diamond's patriotic song "Coming to America"? Why does he have a huge anchor sewn onto his jacket? Is there some Jesus parable about an anchor?
So come last night, I was sure Archuleta would win. Which is how a Democrat would think. Despite all evidence pointing to the Democrat's superior charisma, vitality, momentum, relevance, and musical tastes, they still think the Republicans have some secret silent majority that will prevail in the end. And then, lo and behold, those extra votes showed up on the right side. Hallelujah.
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Hanna and Dahlia, I'll play defense. I completely agree that the sexism vs. racism face-off is useless and also destructive—I'm with Kim forevermore on that one. But Hillary is right, the response to her candidacy has unleashed sexist and misogynist ghouls and evil spirits, and as they've whizzed around us, millions of women have been justifiably offended, Hillary supporters and not alike. I don't have girls, but I felt some kinship with Peggy Orenstein when she wrote last weekend in the NYT about struggling over how to talk to her daughter about those ghouls (specifically, a poster depicting Hillary as a witch) and what they mean about women and power. Yes, Hillary is playing the gender card by pointing that out. And no, she isn't helping unify the party by striding off to Florida to complain about the unseated delegates. Obama's riff is much more soothing to listen to: "No matter how this primary ends, Senator Clinton has shattered myths and broken barriers and changed the America in which my daughters and yours will come of age." That's true. But it's not the only truth of this campaign. Hasn't Hillary earned the right to remind of us that, and isn't the reminder worthwhile, even if it sometimes feels like browbeating?
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That's funny, Meghan—when you just posted asking if any of us had seen Philip Weiss' cover piece for this week's New York, I was debating whether it was worth gathering my own thoughts about it. Poor Weiss is already being eaten alive, entertainingly, in the comments section, and really, his piece is such a feverish blend of anecdotal evidence, confessional sexual fantasy, and ev-psych chestnuts (there are enough "hard-wiring" arguments in there to power a mainframe) that it kind of critiques itself. But if nothing else, you have to marvel at the guy's self-immolating candor, his willingness to expose his fantasy life to public scrutiny in his quest for what the old Kris Kristofferson song called "some strange." I'm all for dismantling our culture's understanding of marriage as a state-sanctioned commitment to lifetime heterosexual monogamy. But what about prioritizing the "heterosexual" part—and granting all Americans the civil rights that come with marriage—before we start rejiggering the "monogamy" part so straight guys can collect all the women they want?
As you point out, what Weiss tries to frame as a radical rethinking of marriage amounts to a code of conduct so familiar as to be reactionary. Hey, what if we lived in a world where, because of their struggles with monogamy, men were subject to a less restrictive set of sexual expectations than women? And what if, instead of working as, say, waitresses, young women could fashion alternate careers for themselves as professional "mistresses"? What if sloppy think-piece writers could conflate the practices of "empowered" courtesan-bloggers like Debauchette or the polyamorous authors of The Ethical Slut with the sequestration and abuse of 14-year-old girls by the FLDS cult? Oh, wait, we're living in that world already.
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Has anyone sat down yet with New York's cover story, a long essay entitled "The Affairs of Men: The Trouble with Sex and Marriage," pegged to the Eliot Spitzer scandal? Inside, however, is not an outré confession but a fiftysomething baby boomer's long-winded attempt to rationalize his desire to screw a variety of women despite being married. Though it presents itself as provocative and edgy, the piece is inflected with the naïve, wishful rhetoric of 1970s thinking about sex.
Philip Weiss, the author, explains that men "hunger for sexual variety" and determines that this hunger is "a basic and natural and more or less irresistible impulse." He comments on Ashley Dupre's "luscious body." He reports that men are using more porn than ever and quotes Mark Penn wondering what will happen when women "realize it." He notes that sexless marriages among power couples are endemic. He harps on his own desire for "some strange." Yet when his exasperated wife proposes an open marriage in response to all his bellyaching, he flinches at the thought that she might avail herself of the new rules, too: "No thanks." Throughout, he presents a view of men as virile, prowling predators and of women as gentle, jealous keepers of social calendars who simply don't feel monogamy to be as much of a challenge as men do. (His wife tells him that the women she knows aren't that interested in sex.) And thus he frets over a "never-ending battle of the sexes," which might be boiled down to: "Men Like To Spread Seed, Women Get Jealous." My god, the man has put his finger on it! And only how many decades after Charles Darwin did it better?
The piece has myriad problems. But the main problem is that it offers nothing new. Weiss is deeply enamored of what he takes to be his own willingness to challenge cultural mores about sex, yet the piece could have as easily been written in 1978 as today. Weiss' cultural references are antiquated—Yoko and John, Gay Talese's Thy Neighbor's Wife—and so are his attitudes. (Prime example: He fantasizes about persuading waitresses in New York that it would be "cool" to have an affair.) There's certainly plenty still to be said about the complexities of monogamy in married life, but at this point the starting point for the conversation should be a lot more advanced than Weiss'. It certainly would have to include the fact that women may well find monogamy to be almost as difficult as men do. One 2007 study found that among married couples with children, some 37 percent of women and 40 percent of men cheated. That's not a huge discrepancy. I pressed to the end hoping for some, any, fresh insight (For example: Has feminism changed women's relationship to sex and marriage? Do couples raised in the post-feminist age deal with their sexual appetites with more clarity than boomer couples do?)—but I kept finding only the same "truth" you find in Philip Roth novels of late: a rather fuzzy picture of the darkness of sexual desire.
To put it plainly, it's tiresome to read men dilate at length on their own hemmed-in libidos while refusing to seriously examine three things: 1) the possibility that unfettered sexual freedom might not actually solve all their emotional problems or satisfy their fantasies, 2) the possibility that their wives might feel the same complicated desire for sexual novelty, and 3) that one consequence of sexual freedom is jealousy. Weiss coyly refers to his desire to have a threesome with a blogger named Debauchette and waxes enthusiastic about breaking down sexual taboos and setting up free-loving polyamorous compounds. (Been there, done that, circa 1971, no?) He goes on and on about sexual variety but doesn't characterize just what it is about variety that's appealing to him and his anonymous peers: the possibility of a brutal, depersonalized sexual encounter? The sheer bounty of potential partners? Novelty itself? All of the above? I'd love to read some, well, probing writing about this.
Basically, the piece lost me as soon as it became clear that Weiss wanted to have zipless fucks while his wife was home planning his social calendar. (Talk about presenting yourself in an anti-erotic light.) It lost me again when I reached the end and found that he never paused to complicate his assumption that having sex with more women would make him happier—and be as mysterious and thrilling as his fantasies. Sex is rarely frictionless. Let's assume that—and then ask what it might be like to be more honest about it.
Read more XX Factor reaction to Philip Weiss' New York magazine article.
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Well, I’ll bite Hanna.
Of course Hillary Clinton is a victim of sexism. She’s also a victim of classism, regionalism, her own cross-eyed optimism, of massive political miscalculation, and of her association with epic philanderer Bill Clinton. The fact that she and some of her supporters may be willing to single out just one of those “isms” and blame it for all her woes is testament to how much identity politics can flatten a country of otherwise intelligent thinking people into a bunch of compulsive one-notes. Sure sexism is partly to blame for Clinton’s failure. But for her to claim that it’s solely to blame or even mostly to blame—oh, and that the media’s failure to harp exclusively on that sexism in this campaign constitutes yet more sexism—is evidence of how far the women’s movement still needs to move in this country.
You wanna play with the big boys? Embrace complex causation! Sexism sucks. But the surest way for feminists to be reduced to mere women is with the claim that absolutely everything bad that happens to them happens because they are mere women.
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Interesting report, released today by the American Association of University Women, which says that the idea of a boys' crisis in education is so much bull. Being one of those women who struggled in school with math (because it did not interest me, or because I was given the idea that, as a girl, I would not be good at it?), I always read these statistic-laced reports with a Twain-esque hairy eyeball. Still, I find compelling the conclusion that the "largest disparities in educational achievement are not between boys and girls, but between those of different races, ethnicities and income levels." Likewise, I applaud the attempt by the AAUW to debunk the histrionic contention that academic gains made by girls in our schools have come at the expense of boys. But what to make of my visit yesterday to the Boston Day and Evening Academy, an amazing alternative high school in the city for kids who are overage for grade level and at high risk for dropping out. The school's enrollment is 55 percent girls, 45 percent boys—also 65 percent black and 27 percent Latino—despite the fact that boys drop out at much higher rates than girls. The gender discrepancy occurs across racial groups, but the gap between male and female dropout rates is higher for black students than for either whites or Latinos. (Not so for Asians, whose overall dropout rates are low). Boys in general may not be in crisis, but from my vantage point, black boys are. Girls didn't cause it. And, lord knows, girls still have their own battles to wage. But the more public schools I see, the heavier grows the plate of worry I carry around for my son. My daughter's plate pretty much stays the same.
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We have reached the moment of the endless military metaphor—the image of one lone warrior steeling herself against the tsunami of enemy forces—which, as any Hillary watcher knows, marks the beginning of the end. Yesterday, in the front-page New York Times story about Hillary and the gender wars, Jodi Kantor let on that Hillary had declined to be interviewed earlier about gender dynamics in the race because it would be "impossible for her to address in a frank way." This implied some deeper, darker truth she would share with the American public when the time was right. Yesterday, in Maysville, Ky., she broke her silence. Instead of letting Ferraro speak for her, Hillary said it herself: "It's been deeply offensive to millions of women"—"It" being the "sexist" pundits, the lewd t-shirts, the "Iron my shirt" moron (who turned out to be the best thing that's happened to Hillary). The sexism is "more respectable," "more accepted," than, say, other unmentioned "isms," she went on, and then on again: The press shrugs at the "incredible vitriol" engendered by the "misogynists."
Ah, bitter, contented Hillary. We have finally come back around to where we started. After the weeping Hillary, the gun-toting Hillary, the race baiting Hillary, now we finally have a Hillary we recognize. Back in the Clinton years, Joe Klein used to write how Hillary was all purposeful and aglow when her husband was discovered to be cheating, because it restored her to the central, aggrieved position where she was most herself. This suggests that for the next 24 hours, or perhaps two weeks, we will get the very best of Hillary: alive, comfortable, warm and toasty and angry all at the same time. She will be our Dolly Parton, our Oprah, our Artemis, our Thelma and Louise: the "avenging angel," as Kantor put it, for millions of American women who have been wronged in some way. We, the women of the press, will be held to feel guilty, responsible, nostalgic, elitist. We will somehow have to explain ourselves. Anyone want to go first?
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For those who have asked how to help:
http://www.endfistula.org/ or http://www.fightfistula.org/programs_partners.asp
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A story today on TheRoot.com about the devastating effects of fistula in the developing world carried this headline: "What $300 Can Do." The dollar figure referred to the cost of repairing the physical damage that occurs to some women who experience long labor and difficult childbirths that leaves them incontinent. These women are often young, and the pregnancies are usually their first. They almost always give birth to stillborn babies and become pariahs in their communities because they lack bladder and bowel control. The $300 cost for the surgical procedure that repairs these emotionally and physically scarred women is often out of their financial reach but not out of the reach of American women. Imagine the message it would send if American women who can do without the paltry $300 economic stimulus checks they will be getting in the mail from the IRS were to donate the money to organizations helping these women. More important, imagine the impact. I say the heck with the economic stimulus plan. Most economists don't believe it will yield major results anyway. How about a sisterhood fistula eradication plan?
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Bonnie, thanks for your response. These are very complicated and delicate issues, which is why so often we'd all prefer to just sip our lattes and talk about something else. One problem is that we don't even have a common language for discussion. We can't even agree on what race is, let alone what words such as racism, exclusion, feminism, womanism mean and should mean to each of us.
Can we all be womanists? Um, I'm not sure we can. Walker's full definition of the term (laid out in her book In Search of Our Mother's Garden: Womanist Prose) and the reason for its creation (because early feminist movements, led by white, middle-class women, ignored oppression based on race or class to focus solely on sexism, and thus denied the dual reality of a black woman's experience) leaves room for debate. Do you have to actually be a woman of color—or just "get" that women of color experience a substantially different kind of oppression than white women? But Alice Walker doesn't need me to speak for her, so I won't. I'll just say that her statement about Clinton carrying "all the history of white womanhood in America in her person" reads to me as just that—statement, not accusation. The statement strikes me as a pretty obvious one, but even if one disagrees, the distinction between statement and accusation is critical. I am so uninterested in blame or shame or apologies as to be nearly comatose when these words float up. Distractions, every one of them. Utterly without use. (The last time I made my son apologize to his sister for whacking her in the head with a Frisbee he grudgingly muttered, "Sorry." Then whacked her again.)
Whenever I travel abroad and encounter anti-American anger or, more often, plain old bewilderment, I ask myself: How should I handle this? I did not ask to be born American. I certainly didn't vote for the current administration. It would be easy to disassociate myself from it all, except for one thing—I'm a little too busy racking up the benefits. Benefits from being born in this country, and from actions taken on its behalf long before I was a sparkle in my father's eye. Many years ago, I visited Germany and felt, at one point in a restaurant, that the waitress was condescending toward me. Suddenly, the thought popped into my head: "Hey, we kicked your butts!" And though none of the kicking was my own, I felt much, much better after that.
That America's influence has waned in the world does not diminish the benefit I've gained and continue to enjoy. For me I need to own that fact, to work to mediate the resulting inequities and to be clear that the past, as Faulkner said, is not dead. It's not even past. Tim Wise, a brilliant writer/lecturer on race, has a great take on it with his gumbo analogy.
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EJ. What a tremendous post. Thank you.
And yes, you are right, the decision to treat the same-sex plaintiffs in this case as a suspect class, warranting “strict scrutiny”—the most rigorous and unforgiving type of constitutional review—is a huge big deal and a step the courts had not been willing to take. The sharp-eyed Marty Lederman caught it last night in this post at Convictions.
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About a year ago, I was visiting friends in Los Angeles. They had a small dinner party in my honor. All of us were lesbians, all relatively political. One couple had been together nearly 30 years, since they met in law school; another couple was raising school-age kids; I was the "gay divorcee," having just separated from my partner after 19 years (much as happened to my parents' marriage after 20 years. Is the 20-year divorce caused by nature or nurture? Discuss).
Naturally, the conversation turned toward the Californians' frustrations that Gov. Arnold kept vetoing the California legislature's freedom-to-marry law ... and their frustrations that their progressive nongay friends dismissed their concern with the issue. After all, their nongay friends told them, registered domestic partnership protected them (California's domestic partnership is equivalent to Vermont's civil unions): Wasn't that enough? Nope. There are legal differences. But even if there weren't, as one friend of mine loves to say, you get to your destination whether you sit in the front or the back of the bus ... and yet it's still an indignity to be forced to sit in the back. I mocked my friends mildly that California was trailing so far behind my state of Massachusetts, and I promised to come to their weddings when they won.
Hearing frustrations that we had almost forgotten in Massachusetts, it struck me how very deeply the Massachusetts marriage decision had sunk into my psyche. I really have stopped feeling 'queer' here. Nobody around here blinks an eye when I talk about the confusions of dating (or not dating, as the case may be: now accepting applicants!) after two decades of marriage. Here in the Boston area, same-sex couples hold each others' hands in public or kiss goodby at the airport without anyone glancing at them: After all, they could be married. Two women or two men who look like they are together get treated openly as a couple—at restaurants or shops—in a way that feels simply honest and dignified. It's a complete transformation from my youth, when the possibility of violence always simmered nearby, when shocking comments could flow at any minute. Another friend says that listening to me is like listening to her older black friends describe living through the end of Jim Crow. Yes, there's still antigay sentiment here in Massachusetts, but it makes an enormous difference when a couple's vows to each other are recognized not just by the pair, not just by their families, but also by our government.
And it's hard to convey how very proud so many Massachusetts citizens are of having gone first. I've had state legislators tell me, in their deeply-stained Massachusetts accents, that they were opposed to gender-neutralizing marriage at first—but once they started hearing from their newly married constituents, they knew they had to vote in favor of upholding the Goodridge decision. They did vote on our side. Those who voted against full marriage rights lost their seats.
California's legislators have already voted twice in favor of full marriage rights for all; the Governator vetoed it, tossing the issue to the courts. Now the issue will be voted on popular referendum this fall. No state's popular vote has yet favored full, gender-neutral marriage. Although California's opinion trends are in the right direction, the state has an enormous conservative population. (It's the state where a 14-year-old killed his classmate for being openly gay.) This vote will be a big test. The good news is that California activists have been preparing for this matchup ever since they lost their first marriage ballot in 2000, in the proposition that the CSC just struck down, with widespread education. If any state can do defeat this bill, it's the Golden State.
I won't be flying out for any California weddings this week; my friends will wait until they've really & truly won. But I lift my coffee mug for the state's 100,000 registered domestic partners and their children—who are full citizens, for now. May the very large country of California, with its population of 36 million, be as peacefully and easily transformed as the tinier, chillier state of Massachusetts!
AND NOW a question for Dahlia: Am I reading the decision correctly? Did the California Supremes just say that sexual orientation is a fully "suspect class," equivalent to race, sex, and religion—that discrimination against LGBT folks gets, as you lawyers say, strict scrutiny? And is that as big a deal as it strikes me?
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Welcome, Kim, and I’m glad you brought up Alice Walker's “womanist” position. Her Root essay last March, “Lest We Forget: An Open Letter to My Sisters Who Are Brave,” endorsing Barack Obama stayed with me a long time. Not just because I found Walker’s trademarked word womanism to describe only “feminist women of color” a little exclusionary.
I do agree that Hillary Clinton is not, as Walker reminds us, "colorless, race-less, past-less," and she escapes racial scrutiny as "a woman" while Barack Obama is always "a black man." Furthermore, playing the race card (whether she then withdrew it or not) was inexcusable. But, although it is true that Hillary has benefited, as have I and other white women (particularly of our generation) from innumerable educational and economic advantages to being Caucasian in this country, I got a little uncomfortable when Walker wrote that Clinton carries "all the history of white womanhood in America in her person." Perhaps wrongly, until reading that, I had not personally considered myself an exploiter of racial inequality. To be clear, I am deeply ashamed of the abomination of slavery and the century of discrimination that followed. I just didn't think simply by being white and of a certain age, I was part of the problem.
I saw Florida recently joined the queue of states that have apologized for slavery. I posted a "Hot Document" a few months ago when New Jersey did the same thing. A lot of Slate readers Frayed for weeks declaiming the emptiness of that state’s gesture while many others wrote angrily that the official apology wasted resources and was not owed by the geographical descendants of New Jersey’s 19th-century citizens. Personally, I think it’s never too late to apologize. In fact, I now want to apologize to Alice Walker on behalf of myself and all white women who believe in equality. Really. Can we be womanists now too?
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Rachael, I could not agree more. Hillary Clinton is far too smart a cookie (oops, is that sexist?) for me to believe her comments were but a sad, sad slip of the tongue. She knew exactly which signal flag she was waving toward the hills of West Virginia. Let's give credit where credit is due.
Hillary aside, though, what I've been wondering about more and more during this endless primary season is whether the damage done to black women/white women relationships will be permanent or not. That there has been damage to this ever-fragile sisterhood is clear to me, both in reading the millions of words flooding the Internet about this subject and in my own personal life. Problems seem to arise not when friends discover they stand on different sides of the Hillary/Barack divide, but when they discover that the very prisms through which they view this contest, and thus the relative importance of race and gender in this society, are—surprise, surprise—miles apart. More critically, the damage is deepened when one party insists that in failing to share her view, the other party is somehow less enlightened.
Just the other day I had a very awkward conversation with a white woman acquaintance who recalled aloud that infamous Gloria Steinem piece in the New York Times way back when. She recalled the article as refreshing and necessary and brave. I remembered it as the first rock tossed in what would become a battle of who-has-it-harder. Most of all, I remembered reading Steinem's line that gender was the most restricting force in America today and laughing aloud, because I was so sure that what she meant to say was that gender is the most restricting force in America today—if you happen to be white and middle-class. Having spent some time that week at a Boston public school that is visibly and painfully segregated—segregated and restricted by race and economic status and parental educational attainment and maybe some other things but certainly not by gender—and having looked up a number of statistics on the economic status of white women versus black men, including, by the way, the number of white women currently in the U.S. Senate (16) compared with the number of African-Americans (um, that would be one), found her view utterly unsupportable. My friend suggested that I was wrong. I said we might have to agree to disagree; she insisted that sexism and misogyny remain a more potent force than racism not only in America, but in my own life if I just had the good sense to realize it. And we were off on that ridiculous hamster wheel again. She quoted poor Barbara Jordan, who has been trotted out so endlessly this year by people who want to disavow the impact of race on a black woman's life that she must be begging to be allowed to rest in peace. I quoted Alice Walker, who famously wrote that womanist (feminist of color) is to feminist as lavender is to purple. In other words, our struggles are not the same. For a while there we seemed to be working together, though. Is that all over now?
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Emily, Hillary can be called a lot of things, but dumb is not one of them. So I don't buy for a second that she thinks that her comments about white working-class voters was the "dumbest thing she ever said." (Especially considering the other worthy candidates for that honor, like the Bosnia sniper-fire kerfuffle.)
Let's look at how this played out. Hillary claimed that "Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again," hinting that he appealed only to highfalutin liberals in blue states. She was going to win blue-collar West Virginia anyhow, but did anyone expect that she'd win by 40 points? And just how did she win by that much? I can't put it any better than Jon Stewart and his bottle of Jack Daniels:
Now that she can take those results to neighboring Kentucky, what with its similar demographics, it's easy to cop that her original comments were in poor taste. They've served their purpose.
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Remember how Hillary said last week that Obama's support was weakening among "working, hardworking Americans, white Americans?" Not smart, some of us at Slate thought. Clinton may not have intended to, but her remark tiptoed up to the line of suggesting that black people aren't also hardworking, and also of playing the race card. She now agrees that she screwed up, John Dickerson alerts me. From an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer:
"On her reference to an AP story about Obama’s support among white voters
BLITZER: Now, your great friend and supporter Congressman Charlie Rangel said and I’m quoting now. 'It’s the dumbest thing you could have said.'
CLINTON: Well, he’s probably right."
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Among the questions in this 1930s Marital Rating Scale, mentioned by Andrew Sullivan.
Take it, and learn your worth. (Only the first page is available.)
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It was Zen Hillary who stepped to the podium tonight after her big win in West Virginia, where she spoke in modulated tones about money, death, and a campaign that may seem eternal but is "just an instant in time.'' Alas, a Clinton supporter named Florence Steen, who was born before women had the right to vote, and "asked that an absentee ballot be brought to her hospice bedside,'' did not live to see Election Day. "Florence passed on a few days ago,'' Hillary announced at her victory party, and the crowd responded, "Awwww ...'' But, she said, Steen's family gave her the parting gift of an "important milestone'' by helping Florence cast a ballot for her. Heavy, for a crowd that came to celebrate, a pitch to historians more than to voters. And the whole dying woman narrative an unexpected choice for someone who's trying to prove her campaign is not on a ventilator.
Even her fund-raising pitch was subdued, and she sounded like an easy-listening version of herself as she hit all the recent talking points, minus any negative mention of Barack Obama. Her supporters at Charleston's Civic Center were on the quiet side, too, and silent as—well, you know—at every mention of her Democratic rival; when she said she and Obama had "always stood together on what was most important'' no one clapped that I could hear. And in the bleachers waiting for the Hillster to arrive, there was considerable disagreement about whether it would be better to stay home on Election Day, or settle for Barack Obama in November if Clinton doesn't get the nomination.
"I won't vote period if she doesn't get it, and I've got a big family and none of them will vote for Obama, either,'' said Carroll Ramsey, who was with his 12-year-old grandson and cast himself as a reverse ageist: "I've been in this old world for 63 years and he doesn't have the experience." The hairdresser sitting in front of him agreed: "I didn't care for all that church stuff with his preacher,'' said Dorothy Chapman, "and really, I don't think he's got enough oomph. He could change my vote, I guess, but he'd have to do some high talkin'.''
"Well, I'm a lesbian,'' said another supporter, Nancy Toney, as heads swiveled, "and these Republicans are not homosexual friendly, so hell yes I would'' vote for Obama in the fall. "I had to go with the woman, but I like both of them.''
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Well, if you're not, go to the playground and look around. One of the three married mommies innocently trailing their little tyke is cheating, according to a new "Sex and the American Mom" survey conducted by Cookie magazine and AOL Body and apparently filled in by 30,000 women. When faced with this statistic, my own (perhaps nervous) husband pointed out that this was a self-selecting survey, answered by people probably attracted by a survey with "affair" in the title. But, then, our own Emily Bazelon says this matches evidence gathered from other scientific surveys and paternity tests. So I guess I have to believe it.
But I, too, would be much more likely to believe that 30 percent of all Cookie-reading moms are having affairs. (And now prepare for a long festering rant about Cookie.) It's not merely that the hot moms of Cookie attend picnics in Italian gowns that cost as much as my laptop or have skinny jeans for every occasion. It's their sense that they deserve to preserve their "lifestyle" exactly as it should be, and God help any chocolate-smeared infant or rumpled husband who stands in their way!
When I first read about Cookie I thought I was the perfect demographic. Those mommy magazines in the ob waiting room always seemed a little sad and frumpy to me, with their tenty maternity clothes and perennial lists of "10 tips" for everything. I was even willing to overlook the fact that Cookie was founded by two hipster New Yorker roommates who didn't even have kids.
Then I picked up an early issue a couple of years ago, and Oh My God. One feature I recall was called something like "You Can Decorate White!" Some poor kid lived in a house with white couches and white side tables and fluffy white rugs. His room was all white, and there was a white model airplane on his bedstand. (Cranberry juice, anyone?) The ads were a marvel and gave the demographic away. Anyone remember that New York magazine feature about the little demon shopper girl—a 6-year-old who seemed to know everything about Marc Jacobs' latest line? Well, every ad was tailor made for her: back to school wear that ranged from $400 shoes to $1,000 plaid miniskirts and made a normal person yearn for JC Penney.
Well, a mom who sends her 6-year-old to school looking like an expensive hooker could certainly not be expected to put up with a little middle-aged husband paunch or to resist the come-on from the hot new Israeli gym teacher.
Back to the main point: Take the survey. If you don't have time, we'll excerpt what we XXers have decided is our favorite question, a decidedly normal one:
Would you rather:
1. Have more sex
2. Make more money
3. Lose ten pounds
4. Get more sleep
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Maybe not in South Carolina, it turns out. You may remember Regina McKnight, who in 2001 was convicted of "homicide by child abuse" for her stillbirth. The state argued that she'd killed her fetus by using cocaine while pregnant. This week, the South Carolina Supreme Court overturned her conviction, saying her public defender failed to do a decent job representing her at trial (or to use the technical term, because of "ineffective counsel")—in part by failing to present medical evidence about the shaky link between the stillbirth and the cocaine use.
This means, I guess, that my sibs and I can't go file criminal charges against our mother for giving us asthma and allergies by smoking while she was pregnant. (Yes, Mom, I know it was way back in the Dark Ages when everyone was doing it. But if everyone was jumping off a cliff, would you jump too??). Alas! The end of personal responsibility is nigh!
But seriously, folks. McKnight was sentenced to 12 years in prison, without parole, for a failed pregnancy. Right now she's still in prison, while the state decides whether or not to appeal. Read more here, here, and here.
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Emily asked a good question yesterday about the proper feminist reading of Hillary Clinton’s weird new Bartleby phase—wherein she is all but mathematically eliminated; superdelegates are running screaming for the exits; the office furniture is being carted out onto the moving vans; and yet still she soldiers on, undaunted, because real women “don’t give up in difficult situations.”
I suppose you can call all this “feminism.” But, as my husband pointed out this morning, if the inability to concede error or defeat—even in light of irrefutable, empirical evidence and in the face of spiraling support and tanking morale—is feminism, George Bush must be the feminist icon of the ages.
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Sometimes, the obvious is lost on me. Anne, I enjoyed your post about Cherie Blair's back-atcha memoir. But I wasn't sure what to make of what you wrote about her announcement that her fourth child was conceived at Balmoral Castle because she'd decided to leave her birth control at home: "The most obvious point to make about all of this is 'I thought she was Roman Catholic,' but I'm not going to say that."Only, you did say that. Sorry, but are you calling her out for being a poor Catholic or a hypocrite? For failing to follow all church teaching, or trying to follow any of it?
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A few weeks ago, back when we were talking about those political wives who stand in the background at press conferences and speeches, staring fixedly into space while their husbands confess to infidelity, criminality, stupidity, I suggested—to the scorn of many readers—that for many wives, particularly those who have some sort of stake in the marriage, the staring-at-the-husband exercise might be worth it: After all, revenge can always be exacted later. Well, it seems that one of the more famous political wives made precisely that sort of calculation.
Cherie Blair has held her tongue for many, many years now—since her husband first became prime minister in 1997, really—and can thus fully savour this moment. After years of subjecting her personal life to the public relations needs of her spouse, she has found a way to hit back, literally below the belt. The Times of London has published extracts of her new memoir and yes, they are quite vicious, as well as startlingly explicit. Among other things, Cherie accuses Tony of discussing how to announce her miscarriage to the great British public, even as she lay "in pain and still bleeding," and says he reacted to the news of her pregnancy with the immortal words "We'll have to tell Alastair" (Alastair being Alastair Campbell, Blair's press spokesman). She also announces that her fourth child was conceived at Balmoral Castle—one of the Queen's many homes—because she'd removed what she delicately refers to as her "contraceptive equipment" from her luggage, fearing that the servants would unpack it all, as they had on a previous visit. But then, "as usual up there it had been bitterly cold, and what with one thing and another ..."
The most obvious point to make about all of this is "I thought she was Roman Catholic," but I'm not going to say that. I'll only say that Cherie must have been really quite angry, all of those many long years, to have published this sort of stuff, given that she must know perfectly well what the British press is going do with it. First reaction of prominent female columnist, for example: "self-serving, smug, opportunistic, vain, shallow-thinking, nasty ..." Anyway, you get the drift. She won't be admired or loved (she isn't anyway) but perhaps she'll enjoy a few precious moments of satisfaction, finally seeing her version of events in print.
*Correction, May 14, 2008: This entry originally referred to the London Times. The newspaper is known only as the Times, though outside Britain it is often described as the Times of London.
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... you never know how strong she is until she is in hot water." This quote from Eleanor Roosevelt is Hillary's latest feminist argument for her candidacy. As she continues to campaign and tries to turn being behind into a virtue, she keeps reminding voters of "women who didn't give up in difficult situations, who fought for equal rights, broke into male-dominated professions and succeeded when others told them to quit," according to AP. She reads letters from supporters urging her to hang in there, even as the delegate math closes in on her.
What do you think of this latest deployment of feminism? For the moment, it seems fair enough to me. It is a sign of her toughness that she's still out there—and poised to win West Virginia tomorrow—and making the strong-woman link explicit can only help to rally the women who support her. But at some point in the next month, barring an unforeseen Obama implosion, Hilllary's perseverance is likely to go from sort of admirable to entirely delusional. Sure, make our day, show you can take the heat of losing. But if Hillary tries to hang up the Democratic nomination all summer, that won't be feminist. Just selfish. I feel reassured that she knows this, or at least knows that a lot of Democrats feel that way, since her advisers last week started promising that she'll only go until June. No tea bag is forever. Nor should it be.
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In which sector do women have it worst? According to a new report by economist Sylvia Hewlett and her co-authors, science comes out looking bad as usual, this time in the private sector. Women are 41 percent of entry-level hires in science, technology, and engineering firms. But 52 percent of them leave. Hewlett, the founder-director of the Center for Work-Life Policy, points out that women's careers stall out somewhat more between the ages of of 35 and 44. (That's when 46 percent of women leave these jobs, as opposed to 40 percent between the ages of 25 and 34, and 40 percent between 45 and 60.)
The timing of the drop-off matches the findings of Mary Ann Mason, former graduate dean at UC-Berkeley, about women with kids in academia. Mason shows in her book Mothers on the Fast Track that mothers more often leak out of the pipeline to tenure after they get their Ph.D.s, and when they come up for associate professor, than when it's time for the tenure decision. It's that 30s and early-40s crunch, when jobs are most demanding and so are kids, if you have them. Mason asked science postdocs, who tend to be in their 30s, about whether they were thinking of leaving the field. Fifty-nine percent of women with children said yes, compared to 39 percent of men with children and 39 percent of single women without children. Those numbers look at lot like Hewlett's drop-out figures.
Hewlett thinks women are tripped up in science, tech, and engineering by the usual suspects: an entrenched sexist culture, the demand to work extreme hours, lack of support, etc. Of the 1,493 women she surveyed (along with 1,000 men), 63 percnet said they'd experienced sexual harassment. Men and women complain at nearly the same rates that they're isolated and lack mentors, but women are substantially more likely to say that the path to career advancement is mysterious, and to worry over juggling work and family (that last stat is 57 percent of women vs. 14 percent of men). Hewlett makes a strong pitch that companies can address all of this—and that rather than chasing workers from around the globe, they should, especially since this is a sector of the economy that's still growing. Her accounts of model programs makes you think that if a firm just makes it clear that it cares about retaining women, it can. Hewlett also found that it doesn't take that much: If a mere 10 percent of women are managers, for example, "all the key variables change dramatically."
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On the evening of Sept. 23, 1994, I went to the movies with my husband and another couple. As this was a couple of years before the birth of our twins, this in itself did not make it a night to remember. Yes, we were going to see the re-released My Fair Lady at the first possible moment—and at the big, beautiful old Ziegfeld. Still, even Miss Never-Met-a-Show-Tune-She-Couldn't-Belt-Into-Submission is not that big a geek; no, there was more. There we were, all settled in and waiting for the guys to return with popcorn and diet beverages, when we heard a familiar voice shouting, "Right there! Two seats!'' So sorry, we told the overdressed TV icon, but they were already taken. "You can't do that! Saving seats is not allowed!' she yelled and started climbing over people on her way to us. Would I have to throw myself over the chair? Would my husband end up on Baba's lap? Thankfully, John Warner appeared just then, in suit and tie, to rescue his companion from further bad behavior. Tugging at his date's elbow, he led her away as gracefully as possible while apologizing profusely and promising he would find them good seats elsewhere—and as she loudly declared she had no intention of sitting way down in front. For some time, we watched him shuttling up and down the main aisle, trying to relocate singles and salvage the evening. And eventually, he succeeded—yay! This was before reality TV, of course, so it seemed all the more thrilling and inappropriate; if this was how Ms. Walters pursued a good seat for a movie she'd seen before, what must life be like for Diane Sawyer? As spectacle, even the freshly restored Audrey Hepburn could not compete. And as high-maintenance, "you may fetch my slippers now' companions went, well, Henry Higgins had nothing on this dame.
Which is why I hate to see her batted down so easily by Caitlin Flanagan in June's Atlantic Monthly, though in "The Uses of Enrichment," her review of Walters' new memoir, Audition, she does allow that the TV frontierswoman has "elicited more irreducible statements of self from more notable people than have all the giants of New Journalism.'' Nicholas Lemann is more generous in his piece, "I Have to Ask,' in The New Yorker: "Walters knows how to put on a show. Although nothing in Audition comes as a shock—Walters doesn't turn out to be a stamp collector, or to have learned Aramaic—it belongs to a part of American culture that Walters helped invent; it has just the right number of personal but not icky revelations, and they enrich, rather than spoil, a sense of intimacy.'' The show was for us, wasn't it? And aren't her unlovely manners so symptomatic of what the women of her generation—the one before Hillary's—had to sacrifice to get there first? (As for her "accidental'' career, what a lot of nonsense; busting your backside for so long you can't even remember how to take a night off only happens on and with purpose.) Not that her shrieking makes you think, "Ah, now there's a strategy to emulate," but more like, "See what it was like for them?'' Even if my twinge of sisterly compassion did not make me want to jump up and offer her my seat or anything; that would only have confused her.
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Following up on Anne A. and Melinda H.'s posts earlier in the week: Let me confess here that I have entirely stopped reading primary coverage. Wake me when it's over. I am more than a little outraged (OK, so I'm cranky today) that so much of each day's NYT front page is devoted to the primary horse race and to the psychological profiling of the candidates, the voters, the pollsters. ... Isn't there any *real* news worth covering? *Must* we keep eating these rewarmed meals? I even turn off NPR and switch to music whenever I can smell primary punditry coming.
And yes, there's a limit to that shrinking news hole. My organization (shameless promotion here: Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism) has been told outright that there's no room for "soft" news on the issues we've been researching (say, family policy or sexual harassment case law) because the election coverage is eating up so much space. Is it that the reality show of primary coverage is just cheaper to produce than original reporting?
I hope that will be my last word on the primary. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.
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Try to imagine the Obama-Clinton race reversed at this point: She is the clear nominee, but he just won’t get out of the race and starts trying on different personas and makes increasingly incendiary racial comments. Actually, it’s impossible to imagine because if the situation were reversed, Obama, as with all the other candidates who knew it was time to get out, would have gotten out, his dignity and reputation intact. A while ago, the first time it looked as if Clinton was not going to make it, Emily B. observed that even if she lost, Clinton was the first woman candidate to have run a serious campaign for the presidency, and the skill, intelligence, and strength she brought to the race would well serve future female candidates. It doesn’t look that way now, however. The horrid, grasping way she is finishing this contest is harming the party and turning her into a reviled, even comical figure. Is she so devoid of an inner life that the prospect of returning to being a high-profile, multimillionaire senator fills her with dread because it means accepting she will never achieve the ultimate fulfillment of her ambition? I suppose she can stay through next week to rack up the votes of her beloved “white Americans” in West Virginia and Kentucky and then still manage to graciously bow out. But as Peggy Noonan wonders, is there anyone who can get her to accept reality?
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I am just sick to my stomach today from reading about the ongoing trouble with relief efforts in Burma. The details keep changing, but the United Nations had to at least temporarily suspend its relief effort because the ruling junta has seized food and other relief supplies to "distribute on its own." More like a "shakedown," as blogger Spencer Ackerman calls it. The end result? One U.N. official says he "has never seen such delays" in a relief effort, and the New York Times is pointing out that it took only 48 hours to set up an "air bridge" of flights to Indonesia after the devastating tsunami in 2004 while only a handful of flights have been allowed into Burma in the six days since the cyclone.
It seems like a cover for either nefarious purposes or utter incompetence, but the junta is claiming the delays are being caused at least in part because of complications in issuing visas. Are you telling me that paperwork is holding up the efforts to save tens, if not hundreds of thousands of lives? No one can work on the weekend to issue some visas? Or, even better, can't a military dictatorship issue a decree putting a temporary moratorium on the need for visas?
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Just a quick note to welcome EJ Graff to our midst! EJ, thanks for the great post. I just finished reading a terrific law review article by Judith Kaye—the chief judge of New York's Court of Appeals—and Anne C. Reddy, looking at why women haven't caught up to men at law firms. Well worth the read.
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Rach, my jaw is still on the floor, too; the "hard-working Americans, white Americans'' remark from that person who still thinks she can be president absolutely disqualifies her from joining the ticket she would have been a drain on anyhow—because Obama cannot say his presidency would be all about turning the page on the old politics, only if anything were to happen to him, the masters of old politics would be back in charge. I really do want to hear the counterargument from women who remain in her corner, though. How does she (or should she?) get anywhere without the support of those shiftless non-whites she apparently can't even hear herself disrespecting? And not too slick a pander to her self-described base, either: "C'mon, y'all, join with other hard-working white people.'
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Hey y'all,
I am delighted to be joining this brilliant assembly. For my first post here, I'd like to point out that Mother's Day is coming up. A year ago I wrote a great deal about how the news media gets working mothers' issues all wrong—talking about these issues as personal problems for individual women, rather than shared economic and public policy questions for a 21st century economy. I was asked to give a short talk on this today... and for my debutante moment, I am posting the talk below. At the bottom I'll give some links to my articles last year, and to research sources for some of the facts here. It's long for a blog post, I admit. Sorry! I didn't have time to be brief ...
Mothers work: Get used to it. Too often, issues faced by working families are treated as personal problems for individual women, private questions of how to balance irreconcilable duties, work and family, things that don’t go together by nature. The consequence: We live in the most family-unfriendly of the developed nations.
But women with children have always worked. Centuries ago, in the Wwestern European and American traditions, for instance, married women with children—at least in the classes of butchers, bakers, and candlestick-makers that most of us descend from—would have been the business partners who took goods to market, kept the shop’s accounts, and oversaw the adolescent labor (once called housemaids and dairymaids, now called nannies and daycare workers). Early in the 20th century, they might have done piecework, gone out into domestic service, taken in laundry, or fed the boarders. But with industrial and consumer capitalism, work left home. Married men got shoved out of the house to work for salaries and wages. And in white, middle- or upper-middle class families, married women got shut in.
That brings us to the part of feminist history that many of us already know: for the college-educated classes, women’s entrance into the waged work force has been moving in fits and starts over the past century. By the 1970s, feminists had knocked down the barriers to women entering the professions in large numbers. But the workplace still isn’t fixed. A good chunk of discrimination now tends to kick in once a woman gets pregnant or takes a maternity leave.
Researching the book I collaborated on for author Evelyn Murphy in 2005, Getting Even: Why Women Don’t Get Paid Like Men—And What To Do About It, I was startled by how many lawsuits were won because managers openly and publicly told women that they couldn’t be hired because they were pregnant; or that having a child would hurt them; or that it was simply impossible for women to both work and raise kids. Many other women we talked with had the same experience, but chose not to ruin their lives by suing. One lawyer who’d been on the partner track told us that, once she had her second child, her colleagues refused to give her work in her specialty, saying that she now had other priorities—even though she kept meeting her deadlines, albeit after the kids were asleep. She was denied partnership. A high-tech project manager told me that, when she was pregnant in 2002, she was asked: "Do you feel stupider?" Her colleague wasn’t being mean; he genuinely wanted to know if pregnancy’s hormones had dumbed her down.
These aren’t just anecdotes. Consider the work being done by Shelley Correll, a Cornell sociology professor. In one experiment, Correll and her colleagues asked participants to rate a management consultant. Everyone got a profile of an equally qualified consultant—except that the consultant was variously portrayed as a woman with children, a woman without children, a man with children, and a man without children. When the consultant was a “mother,” she was rated as less competent, less committed, less suitable for hiring, promotion, or training, and was offered a lower starting salary than the other three. In an associated experiment, if she was late or had absences, she was fired sooner than any of the other three. Researchers have found that women with children who work full time have a significantly larger wage gap compared to men than do women without children who work full time. Last I checked it was 70 cents compared to 77 cents. Meanwhile, men with children get paid more than men without children. Fathers earn more—mothers earn less. There’s a mommy penalty—and a daddy bonus. We call this discrimination.
This exists not because women with children "choose" lower-paying work in lower-paying job tracks. (We can talk about job segregation another day.) Rather, it exists in part because the American idea of mothering is left over from the 1950s, that odd moment in history when America’s unrivaled economic power enabled a single breadwinner to support an entire family. Fifty years later we still have the idea that a mother, and not a father, should be available to her child at every moment, to kiss any boo-boo. But if being a mom is a 24-hour-a-day job, and so is being a professional worker—can you say ‘crackberry’?—then the two roles are mutually exclusive. “Working mother” is treated as the social equivalent of “deadbeat dad”: someone who is failing their God-given responsibilities to their children.
But the United States cannot and will not go back to a time in which women with children do not work in the waged workforce. Over the past century, the U.S. has seen steady upticks in the numbers and percentages of women, including mothers, who work for wages. Since 2000, the percentage of working mothers with infants has held steady at 53.5 percent. When they can afford it, married women with infants take maternity leaves of a year or so, but then head steadily back to work: 75 percent of women with school-age children are on the job. That’s because the vast majority of contemporary families cannot get by without women’s income.
Now, let’s flip this and think from the point of view of the best interests of the children: 70 percent of American children are growing up in families with all adults in the workforce. That means most American families need flexibility to care for their kids. And yet, on a variety of basic policies—including parental leave, family sick leave, early childhood education, national childcare standards, after-school programs, and health care that’s not tied to a single all-consuming job—the U.S. lags behind almost every developed nation. How far behind? Out of 168 countries surveyed by Harvard School of Public Health researcher Jody Heymann, the U.S. is one of only four without mandatory paid maternity leave—along with Lesotho, Papua New Guinea, and Swaziland. And any parent could tell you that it makes no sense to keep running schools on 19th century agricultural schedules, taking kids in at 7 a.m. and letting them out at 3 p.m. to milk the cows, when their parents now work until 5 or 6 p.m. Why can’t 21ss century school schedules match the 21st century workday?
But the news media and public policy makers still don’t see working families’ issues as economic or public policy questions. Consider: If fathers get pushed off the job, that’s discussed under the heading of labor, business, globalization, world trade, all public issues. But if mothers get pushed off the job—because jobs disappear or are redefined during her maternity leave, or because bosses stop promoting a woman with children on the assumption that she will soon refuse to travel or cut back or go part-time—if mothers get pushed off the job, that’s discussed as women making private emotional choices. How natural: She just wanted to stay home with her baby.
In other words, women are seen as having personal lives even in the same arenas in which men are seen as having public lives. And that has consequences. When the demands facing working families are posited as personal issues for individual mothers rather than as a major public policy issue for a 21st century economy, each family must tackle these issues alone. This focus makes as much sense, according to media critic Caryl Rivers, as saying, “Okay, let’s build a superhighway; everybody bring one paving stone. That’s how we approach family policy. We don’t look at systems, just at individuals. And that’s ridiculous.”
For more info:
The Opt-Out Myth, E.J. Graff, Columbia Journalism Review, March/April 2007. (This includes footnotes and links to the supporting research.)
The Mommy War Machine, E.J. Graff, Washington Post Outlook section, April 29, 2007.
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While still shaking my head in disbelief at Hillary Clinton's comments that she is continuing her campaign because "Senator Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again" (See Andrew Sullivan and Obsidian Wings for the "No Republican would get away with this" take. They're right.), I came across this quote from author Toni Morrison, from an online chat with Time, on her endorsement of Barack Obama: "I thought about voting for Hillary at the beginning. I don't care that she is a woman. I need more than that. Neither his race, his gender, her race or her gender was enough. I needed something else, and the something else was his wisdom." What a terribly, um, wise thing to say. More, please.
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According to this report and this new book, conservatives are generally happier than liberals, "because liberals lack ideological rationalizations that would help them frame inequality in a positive (or at least neutral) light." Which is a nice old liberal way of saying whee, no -isms to worry about, plus no drowning polar bears or reason to get all glum about Iraq. There are a few holes in this theory: Anything related to the '60s can still kill the glee, as can government regulations and gay people. (Washington is not supposed to tell us what to do; for that we have a much-married addict who issues instructions on the radio.) The ability to rationalize does seem to have kept our tap-dancing president from losing any shut-eye; in fact, he thinks our troops are having such a "romantic'' time in Afghanistan that he envies them, sometimes. And since the sunnier presidential candidate usually wins, this might even explain the Republican hold on the White House; "Morning in America'' trumps malaise every time. Or as Jeff Greenfield explained it, Bugs Bunny always beats Daffy Duck. Only, who's the Bugsiest in this scenario, McCain or Obama?
I have to say that evidence of the famous McCain temper as served up by the Washington Post was a little on the disappointing side—if one petty, score-settling phone call and some righteous rage at Arizonans who didn't want MLK to have a holiday is the worst they can say of him, where's the threat to the republic? Sometimes, he does say "my friends" like he could gladly strangle somebody, but I've also seen him shrug off bad press in a way that not many officials are able to. (Yes, I did see him go off on Elisabeth Bumiller, but in the main, there is a reason he gets favorable coverage.) And the more I read about him not voting for Bush in 2000, wanting us out of Iraq (before he started the whole 100-year thing), and even suggesting that we went in over oil, the more reasonable he seems. (Could he secretly be a liberal sourpuss?) Until Tuesday, Obama hadn't had a lot to laugh about in a while. But his cool-customer demeanor and ability to pull off a little physical comedy—as when getting the dirt off his shoulders—took our (way more antic, but apparently just hilarious) current president a long, long way. Too far; this contest is not a joke, which is why I find the whole Operation Chaos nonsense so demeaning to the process. But to win it, you do have to be able to laugh at yourself, as "I'm older than dirt. More scars than Frankenstein'' McCain can, and make that smile matter when you give it up, as Obama does. Could one of their debates please be on Comedy Central?
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For whatever it’s worth, I shared Melinda’s sense that Bill had just sort of left his face in his other pants last night. (Now forcibly restraining myself from making the joke about where he might have left his other pants.)
Emily, you are right that the Clinton family tableaux at each of these speeches has proven a sort of still life in public social anguish—but given that it’s historically been the task of the presidential wife to look like a medicated groupie in a good suit, maybe it’s fair to say that Bill was doing a decent male impression of just that last night.
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Emily and Melinda: I thought the ruddy and spaced-out Bill looked like his heart was under strain last night for a different reason: because he was witnessing the first chapter of his wife's valedictory speech. The whole proceedings seemed logy, so fence-mending, so puzzlingly bile-free ... and then I realized, this was her way of saying goodbye. Granted, it'll be a long, Clinton-style leave-taking, with lots of popping back through the front door for wallet and keys and an extra hug and hey, just for old times' sake, can we talk one more time about seating those mathematically meaningless Florida and Michigan delegates? But really, isn't she just marking time so she can win Kentucky and West Virginia, let Obama reach an uncontestable majority of superdelegates, and leave the race on a less ignominious note (all the while, as Trailhead suggested last night, hoping against hope for a late-breaking video on YouTube to expose her opponent as a Boy Scout-molesting flag-burner)?
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Emily Y., I quite agree that we haven't seen the last of the rev.; he'll be with us through November and beyond. But in trying to prove that Obama couldn't stand up to the Attack Machine, Hillary put him through a pretty good simulation and wound up proving that he can so—because he just did. I didn't read Bill Clinton's body language quite the way you did; no question his wife's dramatic interpretation of gun-totin', hawg-sloppin', beer-drinkin' Amuricans was sub-par—but to me, 42 just seemed checked out. In fact, the red face, nobody's-home expression and mouth gaping open were kind of worrying.
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We surely haven't heard the last of the Rev. Wright problem, but after the Obama campaign has been focused on fighting off the notion that Obama is part of this country's deep racial divide, it did feel good to hear him talk again of it being time to transcend categories (though surely it was no coincidence that the backdrop of faces behind him were mostly white women, some old enough to be his mother). Speaking of his mother (I wasn't bothered, Emily, by his shorthand description of her), I couldn't help but think of the obituaries that appeared Tuesday of Mildred Loving, the black woman who was arrested with her white husband in Virginia for the crime of being married to each other. The Supreme Court finally struck down miscegenation laws in 1967; if Barack Obama's parents had traveled with him in Virginia when he was a baby, their mere existence as a family would have put them in legal jeopardy. And now a man who's the product of a marriage that would have been illegal in the majority of states is poised to be the Democratic nominee for president. I hope Mrs. Loving got satisfaction from this.
I also enjoyed watching the backdrop behind Hillary—the shifting facial expressions of Bill Clinton. I'm always intrigued by the semiotics of what she does with Bill. At the last few election nights she's had him in camera range as she spoke; whenever she has him close it seems to signal she feels she's in trouble. At first Bill watched her with that lip-biting look of enchantment we know so well, but as the speech wore on the mask seemed to drop and you could almost read his thoughts: "Hill, you haven't got it. I've got it, and you haven't, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Hill, guess what, all those years you sacrificed for my career—well, it turns out I wasn't holding you back. You're only on this stage because of me, and even so, now that it's your turn and you had everything in your favor—Hill, you just haven't got it. And let's face it, Obama, he's got it."
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Nothing like a good welfare-mom-makes-good story, Emily; look what it did for J.K. Rowling. And though Obama's mom (and everybody else's, for that matter) was obviously so much more than that, this is just the kind of pithy, shorthand description that other Democratic candidates could never really manage, so I'm going to say I can live with it. For me, last night was like jumping into a turquoise infinity pool after a forced march across the desert with maybe a pack of javelina and a few locusts...OK, you get the drift. But isn't it funny how much smarter other people seem when they happen to agree with you? Last night's result suggested that even a 24/7 cable diet of Jeremiah Wright has not done Obama in. And that even a big, shiny gas tax holiday promised by a woman doing one weird Mammy imitation is too 90s for voters now. It suggests - I'm not saying proves, but leads me to hope - that we have learned something since those 1988 debates about the Pledge of Allegiance.
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I'm feeling better this morning: I agree with you, Dahlia, about the virtues of Obama's speech, and now that we've woken up to the slim margin of Clinton's victory in Indiana, the superdelegates should have an excuse to break for him and help Democrats bring this loooonnngg contest to a close. Which, for the good of the party and the nominee, they should start moving on. What's everyone else thinking about last night and where we are?
The line that jumped out at me in Obama's speech was this one: "This is the country that made it possible for my mother—a single parent who had to go on food stamps at one point—to send my sister and me to the best schools in the country on scholarships." The facts are true; the sentiment resonates. It's a good line for a candidate to utter when he's trying to shake the impression that he thinks about regular people as abstractions. And yet what an odd essence to reduce Obama's mother to. Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro was a college student in Honolulu when she married his father and had her son. She was in graduate school there—after marrying again and living in Indonesia—when he and his half-sister went to prep school on a scholarship. In this illuminating profile by Janny Scott, she never seems at the mercy of circumstance. She may not have had much money at various points of her life, but that seems like a chosen path, and a bit beside the point. Even in his hardscrabble food stamp moment, Barack Obama is entirely unordinary. He doesn't pretend otherwise, really, but it was odd to see his mother reduced to her one-sentence politically useful self.
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Emily you’re right: It would have been bad enough if this Democratic primary had seen voters tearing the party in half over the war or immigration or health insurance. But it’s dispiriting as hell to see them ever more hardened along race, class, age, and gender lines. These very angry, very personal fissures in the party make Obama’s insistence tonight that “we may not look the same or come from the same place, but we want to move in the same direction” more dubious than ever. Many people who desperately wanted to believe that of themselves last January spent the better part of April torching their neighbors’ lawn signs.
Still, if tonight’s speeches were any indication, Clinton may be going down fighting, but she is going down. Without the fire of her Pennsylvania speech or scoring a knockout by any definition, she actually gave about the same speech as Obama—health care, gas prices, mistreated veterans, icky McCain, economy, fond nod to the grandparents—but somehow hers was all about Hillary, while his was all about us.
And if Clinton was going down fighting, Obama looked like he was finally, after months of wheezing and gasping, prying himself off the ropes. Somehow, Clinton is at her best when she’s on offense. Also when she’s on defense. But Obama reminded us tonight that he is at his best insisting that both offense and defense require games of “names and labels” and "distraction" and "exploitation." To that end, both he and Clinton congratulated the other, and each sounded welcome notes of reconciliation and party unity. But while she talked about “winning” and “victory” and “teams” and “tiebreakers,” he’d moved beyond it. Finally.
And just by stepping back from these increasingly small fights, he maybe reminded us that we, too, are bigger than all that.
Read more XX Factor reactions to the Indiana and North Carolina primaries.
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Another night, another split decision, another unrelenting headache. (This according to CBS, which called Indiana early for Clinton, and Obama's clearer win in North Carolina.) Torie is right, we at the Gabfest have looked high and low for the best sports metaphor to describe the Obama-Clinton marathon, and our listeners sent in lots of great entries. But I'm going biblical tonight, and it's not the candidates I'm after. It's the voters. They remind me of King Solomon threatening to split the baby in half—without, necessarily, the wisdom to call off the operation before it's too late. The baby is the party, straining as it's pulled in two directions, a tug of war apparent once again in exit polls that show black people line up behind Obama (92 percent in North Carolina, according to a number that just flashed across my TV screen!) and white women, and to a lesser degree white men, trot to Clinton. The baby is also the eventual nominee, and the heady promise of unity and purpose that this primary season once held. Remember how Democrats used to marvel at their choice between two great candidates, and may the best man or woman win? Now they both look weary and torn asunder and highly unmighty.
King Solomon took out his knife to teach a lesson, and to figure out which of the baby's professed mothers was the true one. I'm not sure what lesson these endless elections could possibly have to teach (other than that too much inclusivity is a bad thing, and that the Republicans' winner-take-all system looks pretty good right now?). Or how these King Solomon voters could possible identify the true candidate. Maybe because there is no such thing, or because the knife has already drawn too much blood. Or maybe because my metaphor falls apart in the end. Fittingly. Superdelegates, save us.
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Slate's Gabfest team has been searching since March for the best sports metaphor for the 2008 presidential campaign, with boxing, Quidditch, Monopoly, and cricket taking the lead. But the Kentucky Derby this past weekend, in which a filly named Eight Belles—named by Hillary Clinton as her favorite to win—came in second and was almost immediately euthanized after breaking two ankles during her run. John Dickerson says Clinton's ill-fated pick "won the day's prize for bad political omens." In an e-mail to Slate staffers, David Plotz wrote, "Inexperienced phenom brown horse wins. Filly rallies to finish second and dies from the effort." Mickey Kaus calls it "a thought born embalmed as a cliche."
Obvious though it may be, the metaphor didn't strike me until others pointed it out. The first thought I had when I saw the news was, "How awful." I was a horseback rider as a kid and obsessively read any horse-related tale I could find—from Black Beauty to truly awful YA series like Thoroughbred. Thoroughbred starred a young girl named Ashleigh with dreams of being a jockey and her horse, an underdog filly named Wonder. Ashleigh was the only one to see Wonder's spirit and potential (natch) and the only one with the sensitivity to ride Wonder to victory (natch.) Together, they became a winning machine (natch), competing with and regularly defeating the boys, equine and human alike. A wonderful, schlocky story that gave me a completely distorted view of the horseracing world—and gender relations.
That sort of childhood reading material and the "Girls can do anything!" message that was reinforced by my parents, my teachers, and television (the "girl joins and dominates the boys' sports team" was a standard story line in many a Saturday morning TV show, including Saved by the Bell) shaped my early views on gender. One of the hardest life lessons for me to learn is that females, both in the animal and human worlds, can't do everything males can. Eight Belles' name is now up there with Ruffian, a great female horse who ran herself to death in a race against the boys. There are limits to the usefulness of this new angle to the old politics-as-horse-race metaphor, though. Humans don't have to be put down when their legs break. They can race again.
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Not only is it OK to admit being so over this endless campaign, it's all but required. Privately, even Stephen L. Carter must be fed up at least some of the time, with revulsion and rage and—where did that come from?—passion taking turns. I've started viewing it like any long-term relationship, in which just when you think you will never laugh at that stupid joke ever again—well, you do. And just when you're sure that if one more person says superdelegate you will run screaming into the traffic, you suddenly find that embarrassing as it is, you do care about Guam. Or so I can imagine.
You know who else seems sick of this Democratic primary? Barack Obama. Not that he’s phoning it in or anything, but a certain weariness seems to have set in. Which I take as yet another sign that not only is he not too elite, he might be too normal: He still thinks he can go off script sometimes, and he lets it show when he’s had it with trying to insist on a new kind of politics if all we really want to carry on about is flag pins. When Hillary Clinton says she would never have chosen Jeremiah Wright as her pastor, she isn’t kidding; you wouldn’t stick with that guy for five minutes if your every human impulse was run through the purifying filter of, “but how would that play in Scioto County?"
Yesterday, I talked to Christine Jennings, whose ’06 Congressional race for Katherine Harris’ old seat is, in effect, still going on. Jennings has been on the campaign trail almost every day since thousands of voters in Sarasota County reported having trouble casting their ballots on electronic voting machines in that one race—a race that according to the tally she challenged, she lost by 369 votes. In ’08, she still has the same old opponent, only he’s an incumbent now. And if that weren’t jolly enough, two weeks ago her ’06 primary opponent decided to get back in the race, too, as an independent. So as you can imagine, Jennings isn’t all that sympathetic when voters tell her how worn out they are with both Hillary and Barack. “I tell them, 'Don’t fall for that. That’s how all those Republicans on TV saying this race is dragging on too long want you to feel.’ (It was also the Republican-controlled legislature in her state, she points out, that cannily voted to switch the date of the Florida primary, and tucked that change into the wildly popular bill outlawing the impossible-to-audit voting machines that Jennings believes cost her the '06 race: “They knew exactly what they were doing.") “Democrats love to focus on the issues, and that’s good, but we need to focus on winning." And be willing to endure even the sight of Sidney Blumenthal trying to paint Obama as an old-fashioned '60s radical—yes, though that decade ended when the candidate was 8. Because if Christine can hang in there, so can we.
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A question for all of you: At what point does it become socially acceptable to admit that one is no longer interested in the Democratic primary? And at what point will newspapers stop treating the subject as if it should still be the focus of national attention? I rather thought we had passed this juncture a month ago when Nora Ephron, speaking for millions, described the primary as an "unending last episode of Survivor. They're eating rats and they're frying bugs and they're frying rats and they're eating buts; no one is ever going to get off the island and I can't take it anymore."
And yet it goes on: We've now had the Rev. Wright scandal not once, but twice. We've now had major newspaper and political blog coverage of the Guam primary, where the Hillary campaign declared that their candidate had "historic ties" to the island, Obama won by seven votes, and an apparently astonishing 4,500 people turned out for the election. The same observations about both candidates get recycled in different ways, to the point at which it's not worth reading the newspaper anymore.
The truth is that there wasn't—let's face it—that much new that we were ever going to learn about Hillary Clinton during this campaign: We already know more intimate details about her life than most of us know about most of our best friends. The excitement of the early part of the primary was learning about Obama and watching him draw even with Hillary. But that moment has passed, and we aren't going to learn anything else about him until we see him debate John McCain. Nevertheless, I have the feeling that one still isn't quite allowed to say any of this in public, as a degree of earnest political involvement is expected, at least from "Slate's women," and other community-spirited folk. Or am I wrong?
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Well Emily Y., you sure were right that Obama had to fend off Wright more decisively. Now he has, and it's not clear whether we should thank the good reverend for behaving so badly that he pushed Obama to denunciation or just wish he'd kept his big mouth shut this week. I veer toward the latter. If we look back and this turns out to have killed Obama's candidacy, or wounded him too badly for him to win the general election, it will be one very sad tale. I don't buy the father-son explanation, either. Wright is not Obama's father. He's just a big baby.
Ann, I think you are on to something. This down-with-the-people moment for Hillary is like a cannier and more broadly appealing version of her earlier impersonation of Reese Witherspoon's character in Election. When she lost in the early rounds, she seemed like the brainy girl who always loses out to the cool guy. Now she's the old gal who's been around a few times and knows how to talk hunting in Scranton, Pa. It's amazing to me how such symbolism matters more than all the money the Clintons raked in last year and their general bubble existence. There should be a new word for how elite they are! And yet, no matter. All of this would be pretty unobjectionable, I suppose, if not for this insane gas-tax vacation that Hillary is advocating. It's the ultimate pander: The campaign can't name a single economist who supports it as good policy, according to John Dickerson in Slate today. So this is where proving you are one of the people gets you? Can't she just take her eggs scrambled and drink more beer?
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Rachael, I've got to back you up on this one, but for different reasons.
First, let me say as the freelancing, stay-at-home mother of a very active 2-year-old that those plastic eyesores save my life on a daily basis between the months of April and October, when we're able to be outside. I, too, am in the 'burbs—well, technically I'm not, being in Kansas City, Mo., proper, but to most city dwellers, my neighborhood of single family homes built in the 1920s would look suburban enough. I don't buy the Little Tikes car, the basketball hoop, or the myriad plastic containers of bubbles strewn across my lawn because I have any illusion that they look nice. I'm not trying to keep up with the Joneses; I'm merely trying to keep the peace. Get cooped up with a toddler screaming for no discernible reason, and you'll be running outside for primary colors, too—anything that will stop the screaming, provide a diversion, create a distraction. And the reason those toys are still strewn across the lawn? Because someone fell down and commenced a new fit of screaming, which needed to be tended to right away by rushing inside for a Band-Aid.
There's another key phrase here: Going to a playground becomes too exhausting for a parent to contemplate. Much of parenthood, I have found, is fueled by decisions unfortunately made because of exhaustion. I'm guessing that Michael Pollan's youth of playing in the lilac and forsythia, held up as what we should be aspiring to, had a very different reality than those of kids today. Even those who "stay home," such as myself, are typically doing some work from home, so that when 8 p.m. rolls around, kids are in bed, and there's time to take the wagon off the front lawn, there's little drive to do so. When I worked full-time, at 8 p.m. I was packing up for the next day of shuttling people off to day care before I passed out; now I'm going up to start my last shift of the evening, writing for whatever deadline I currently have.
This article also reminded me of a recent conversation I had with a rather well-off businessman here in Kansas City who was lamenting people living in suburban developments that are so self-contained, people rarely need to leave them. I don't live in one of them—yet. As I tried to explain to him that the cost of keeping my house in Kansas City proper, fashionably close to the urban core, was going to become prohibitively expensive once my son hit high school (Kansas City, Mo., public schools are notoriously very bad, as they are in D.C., where I used to live—with a few, hard-to-get-into exceptions, they're not an option unless you want to seriously gamble with your child's education), it was like my argument fell on deaf ears. Well, not deaf ears—just more-monied ones failing to appreciate that much as I don't necessarily prefer a beige house in a suburb with no trees, I might not be able to afford the current $9,000-a-year tuition (who knows what it will be in 12 years) needed to send my son to a decent school if I stay in my house and remain in my profession (either freelancing or back at a full-time job). A cheaper house in the lawn-ornamented suburbs where public schools are good will probably make more financial sense for our family, eventually. So you see, it all goes back to economics. Are leafy streets of houses with varied architecture and perhaps fewer swing sets preferable? To many, yes. Are they affordable for most families in the long haul? Certainly not with the way the economy seems to be headed.
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Why on earth is Hillary's Howard Wolfson claiming she didn't say "rich people—God bless us''? Because if you watch the snippet from O'Reilly, she's a little tripped up, but all she seems to be trying to convey is a version of "to whom much is given, much is required''—from Luke. (And JFK, and lately, Eliot Spitzer, but never mind that.) The point is, this is like issuing a denial that you said "Happy Mother's Day!'' And lying to dispute Fox News video—nah, no one will catch you on that—on such a completely benign, even inarguable, statement? What an odd thing to do. (Force of habit? Just keeping his skills up? Or most likely, assuming her words would be twisted into, "Greed is good," which was clearly not her intent. I think they call that projection.)
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Like you, Emily, I've been trying to figure out how Hillary pulled off the feat of becoming the candidate of the non-elite. How did she conquer the social condescension that, as Jeff Greenfield's smart piece points out, Orwell diagnosed as an occupational hazard of high-minded liberals? Much as I hesitate to play the gender card again, I think maybe the secret lies in sex—and age. Yes, Clinton went to Wellesley and to Yale Law School, and people in Arkansas felt she put on airs. Back in the '90s, people in D.C.—and across the country—joined in finding her a snooty and patronizing reformer, and what efforts she made to tone it down convinced nobody. Here's what has changed. She was younger then—her White House years began when she was Obama's current age. She's a postmenopausal woman now. As a credential for membership in (or at least solidarity with) the non-elite, hormonal shifts fit the bill—certainly when the candidate in question is up against a vigorous, handsome young guy whose upward trajectory shows no signs of slowing. I could riff some more about how the post-fertile identity alters a woman's social status, how menopause is about coping with change that isn't chosen—is beyond one's control—and how that might speak to those who feel unprivileged, as though perks have passed them by. Or is this ridiculous?
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Once upon a time, a nice house in the suburbs with yard enough to contain energetic children served as a snapshot of the American dream. But these days, those of us who rationally weigh the pros and cons of urban vs. suburban living and end up on a quiet cul-de-sac in a good school district are feeling the heat. For example, in a Slate "Culturebox" posted today, Tom Vanderbilt decries the hostile takeover of the American lawn by ugly plastic toys and giant swing-sets that no one ever plays on. As the owner of a too-large suburban home and accompanying "enormous swing-set with a plastic slide," I feel compelled to defend my honor.
First, a note about those plastic toys. While they might be unsightly, they are durable, safe (no splinters or jagged rusty metal), and affordable. We have a few that get hauled into the garage each night, but the main feature of our backyard is a sturdy wooden play set with swings, a slide, a rock-climbing wall and other accessories. When the weather is nice, and occasionally even when there's a foot of snow on the ground, my two sons play on it probably two or three hours a day. That leaves many hours of the day when one could pass by and see it looking lonely and abandoned, but it is by far their favorite plaything. However much or little they use it, it was a worthwhile investment. It can accommodate the dozen or so kids who live on our street, or our passel of nephews, or even all of them at the same time. It provides exercise, helps develop agility and self-confidence, and even jolts the imagination, as the kids are always coming up with games whose rules and objectives escape me. One of the knocks on parents these days is that we either park the kids in front of the TV for six hours with a bag of chips, or we hover over them obsessively and overbook them with dance, gymnastics, karate, and swimming lessons. To me, having some toys in the yard to go climb on is a remedy to both of those ills.
I admit to getting a little rankled when I read burb-bashing pieces. For one, they make me feel like the subject of an anthropological study. "Who are these strange creatures, and why do they choose this alien lifestyle?" (Frankly, I don't understand the fascination. I don't sit around wondering why people in the city prefer to live in small apartments on noisy streets; I figure they have logical reasons for doing so.) For another, such pieces can fall back on stereotyping and generalization. Admittedly, the cookie-cutter houses and the parade of indistinguishable SUVs contribute to that, but it lacks intellectual rigor to say we're all alike. One stereotype in particular bugs me: the one about how we come home from work, park our cars in our huge garages, then go inside our big-box houses and don't socialize with the outside world. That has not been my experience anywhere I've lived, but I do think there is an applicable kernel of truth in there. If I may indulge in one generalization, I've found that—aside from the occasional nosy homeowner's association president whom we all ignore—people in the burbs tend to adhere to a live-and-let-live ethos. You think a garden is a good use for your lawn? Good for you; plant it. Have fun with the weeds and the bugs, and I'll do my best to keep my kids from trampling it. But on my little patch of green space, I vastly prefer the sights and sounds of children laughing and playing. Your "garish blight" just happens to be my harmony.
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Via InstaPundit comes the heartbreaking story of Nancy Hey and Christopher Slitor, who have spent the last three years fighting to regain custody of their daughter, Sabrina. Like many babies, Sabrina lost weight after she came home from the hospital, but Hey took the child for repeated doctor's visits, supplemented nursing with formula, and took her to the hospital for further care when her weight gain lagged. Still, they were subject to repeated visits from social workers, who removed Sabrina from the home when she was just 3 weeks old—and at a normal weight.
I think that, by and large, social workers are overworked, underpaid, and certainly underappreciated. They often have too many caseloads and face harrowing conditions. But this case leaves me with a few questions. Barring conditions like a history of maternal drug use or a home stockpiled with loaded guns laying around, who in their right mind thinks it's a good idea to remove a healthy 3-week-old from a loving home? Wouldn't someone who was neglecting and starving their child not be the kind of person who made multiple trips to the doctor and allowed their child to be hospitalized to figure out what's wrong?
Some of what I've read about this story—an editorial in the Washington Examiner, the couple's own Web site—hints that Nancy Hey has a disability, described as "disorder that makes it difficult for her to recognize non-verbal signals from others" but doesn't say how that would affect her parenting. (And the family had hired a full-time nanny when Sabrina was born.) So while there may be elements of this story that aren't as well-known, it should be said that Hey's husband and Nancy's own mother have applied for custody but have thus far been denied. Given that governmental agencies are overburdened with these cases and there are foster-care shortages in so many places, I'll never understand the need to keep a little girl from the parents and grandparent who love her.